What Can the White Man Say to the Black Woman?
For four hundred years he determined which black woman's children
We remember that Fannie Lou Hamer, a poor sharecropper on a
What can the white man say to the black woman?
We see him lined up, on Saturday nights, century after century,
Let us take note:
He has not cared for a single one of the dark children in his
Where are the Cherokee, my great grandmother's people?
Where are the children of the Blackfoot?
Of the Cheyenne?
Where are the children of "the slave coast" and Wounded Knee?
We do not forget the forced sterilizations and forced starvations
What has the white man to say to the black woman?
When we have children you do everything in your power to make
What has the white man to say to the black woman?
From the beginning you have treated all dark children with
Thiry million African children died on the way to the Americas,
What has the white man to say to the black woman?
Let us look around us: Let us look at the world the white man has
It is a world in which the black woman is still forced to provide
It is a world many of our babies die at birth or later
What has the white man to say to the black woman, and to all the
Let us consider the depletion of the ozone; let us consider homelessness
And that all of our children, because of the white man's assault
What has the white male lawgiver to say to any of us? Those of us
Abortion for many women, is more than an experience of suffering
To make abortion illegal again, is to sentence millions of women
Given his history, in relation to us, I think the white man should
What can the white man say to the black woman?
Only one thing that the black woman might hear.
Yes, indeed, the white man can say your children have the right to
I will recall those who died of broken hearts and broken spirits
I will raise up all the mothers who died exhausted after
But I will go even further:
I will tell you black women, that I wish to be forgiven the sins
And I will free your children from the insultingly high infant
I will remove myself as an obstacle in the path of your
That is what the white man can say to the black woman.
We are listening.
Alice Walker
would live or die.
Let it be remembered. It was he who placed our children on the
auction block in cities all across the eastern half of what is
now the United States, and listened to and watched them beg for
their mothers' arms, before being sold to the highest bidder
and dragged away.
Mississippi plantation was one of 21 children; and that on
plantations across the South black women often had 12, 15, 20
children. Like their enslaved mothers and grandmothers before
them, these black women were sacraficed to the profit of the
white man could make from harnessing their bodies and their
children's bodies to the cotton gin.
to make the black mother, who must sell her body to feed her
children go down on her knees to him.
midst, over hundreds of years.
Gone.
Gone.
Where are the children of the Lakota?
Gone.
Of the Chippewa?
Of the Iroquois?
Of the Sioux?
Of the Akan?
Of the Ibo?
Of the Ashanti?
Of the Maori and the Aborigine?
on the reservations, here as in South Africa. Nor do we forget
the small-pox infested blankets Indian children were given by
the Great White Fathers of the United States Government.
them feel unwanted from the moment they are born. You send them
to fight and kill other dark mother's children around the world.
You shove them onto public highways into the path of oncoming
cars. You shove their heads through plate glass windows. You
string them up and string them out.
absolute hatred.
where nothing awaited them but endless toil and the crack of a
bullwhip. They died of a lack of food, of lack of movement in the
holds of ships. Of lack of friends and relatives. They died of
depression, bewilderment, and fear.
made for the black woman and her children.
cheap labor in the form of children for the factory farms and on
the assembly lines of the white man.
malnutrition, and where many more grow up to live lives of such
misery they are forced to chose death by their own hands.
women and children everywhere?
and the nuclear peril; let us consider the destruction of the rain
forests-in the name of the almighty hamburger. Let us consider
the poisoned apples and the poisoned water and the poisoned air,
and the poisoned earth.
on the planet, have a possibility of death by cancer in their
almost immidiate future.
who love life too much too willingly bring more children into a
world saturated by death.
beyond anything most men will ever know, it is an act of mercy
and an act of self-defense.
and children miserable lives and and even more miserable deaths.
be ashamed to attempt for the unborn child of the black woman.
To force us to have children for him to ridicule, drug, turn into
killers and homeless wanderers is a testament to his hypocrisy.
life. Therefore I will call back from the dead those thiry million
who were tossed overboard during the centuries of the slave trade.
And the other millions who died in my cotton fields and hanging
from my trees.
under the insult of segregation.
birthing 21 children to work sunup to sundown on my plantation.
I will restore the full health all those who perished for lack
of food, shelter, sunlight, and love; and from my inability to
recognize them as human beings.
I commit daily against you and your children. For I know that
until I treat your children with love, I can never be trusted by
my own. Nor can I respect myself.
mortality rates, short life spans, horrible housing, lack of
food, rampant ill health. I will look at your children and see,
not a threat, but a joy.
children, against all odds, are making towards the light. I will
not assassinate them for dreaming dreams and offering new
visions of how to live. I will cease trying to lead your
children, for I can see I have never understood where I was
going. I will agree to sti quietly for a century or so, and
meditate on this.
