ABSTRACT
I am especially lucky to have been born in the early part of the 1950s, for I was able to witness firsthand during my girlhood racial apartheid and that period in our nation's history where sexist gender roles were reinscribed, as well as the marvelous cultural revolution in our society that was created by the civil rights and feminist movements. Making the transition from girlhood into young womanhood at a time when our nation was in transition— breaking with patterns of domination and the racialized colonialism that had characterized the conquest and terrorization of Native American Indians and then later their African counterparts. Rebellion and revolution, the will to transform myself and demand transformation within the country and culture where I am most at home is my birthright, the legacy of the times in which I was born and grew into mature womanhood. While there are many ways we learn, many epistemologies (ways of knowing), we all know that experience coupled with awareness and critical reflections about what is happening around us and why it is happening is one of life's 173great teachers. To have been raised during our nation's period of legally sanctioned apartheid, when so many rights were denied us based on the color of our skin, to stand before stores that would not allow us to enter, to see the closing of our beloved black schools, and to board in the wee hours of the morning the buses that took us away from the world that was most familiar to us and into a strange, horribly racist world where we would always be treated as second-class citizens, never the equals of the white children who were our peers and only sometimes, on rare occasions, our allies and our friends, was to know firsthand the anguish and the pain, the fear and the subordination. But it was also to know firsthand the sweetness of solidarity, of struggle, of standing in resistance. To have lived in the fifties when the violence against women and children that I saw in our communities went unnoticed and uncared about, to know that women stayed with men because they could not get jobs, not have bank accounts, and credit cards, all these were the ways I learned about sexism and patriarchy. Living to see serious change, being a part of both the struggle for racial and gender justice, and seeing profound changes occur have given me a foundation of hope that sustains and strengthens my activism.
