Echo 1—Palpable: Liberating Silences
“Fannie Lou Hamer,” unlike “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” (among others), is still not a household name. Her relative obscurity is as profound as the socially inflicted marginalization conveyed by that obscurity. Poor Black women in rural and urban communities in the United States are continuously damned, deemed disposable, and despised. Whether public housing tenants, welfare recipients, domestics and household workers, low-wage factory laborers, or agricultural workers, they all experience precarity even as they become sources of profit—ideological and monetary—for others
It is in this context of obscurity, that deliberate moves to silence are so palpable.
Part historical biography, part political exegesis, part current events primer, Until I Am Free narrates the grounded realities and spiritual faith that gave rise to Hamer’s activist conviction and political philosophy. A sharecropper since the age of six who became politically active in her mid-40s, Hamer suffered economic exploitation, beatings-by-white police officers (and the Black male prisoners commanded by them), and sterilization-by-white medical professionals. She contended with retribution for trying to exercise her right to vote, which she saw as a tool in service of something greater—economic justice. From 1962 until her death from heart failure in 1977, Hamer struggled to secure civil rights, economic self-sufficiency (“a pig and a garden”), and community wellness.
Poor and working-class Black women like Hamer have been publicly and habitually demonized and ill-treated. Indeed, caricatures of poor Black women, which render them mute even while advancing political agendas of, for instance, urban renewal, welfare reform, and “predatory inclusion,” have openly rationalized systems of inequalities, as well as shrouded mechanisms of power. And these mechanisms of power are in operation whether the targets are poor Black women themselves or, as Blain shows, other Black women across the class spectrum.
So, there is that, and this: Black women have, as individuals and a collective, experienced disregard and violence not only in white society, but also in Black society. This has been so in Black families, households, neighborhoods, communities, organizations, and liberation movements. As Blain observes, Hamer faced disrespect from other civil rights leaders “whose conception of leadership did not include an impoverished and disabled Black woman with a sixth-grade education.” (48) This disregard has also shaped poorer Black women and their inclusion (or lack thereof) in narrations of Black liberation struggles.
Again, these acts of narration are no abstract matter. They are replicative forms of condescension and hostility born of, and steeped in, global capitalism, racism, and patriarchy. It is about power, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot makes so clear in Silencing the Past. “What is at stake in pastness,” as Hazel V. Carby writes in the book’s Foreword, “is the future, the process of becoming.”
Narratives reveal and shape our historical memories, attitudes, and politics. Narratives reveal and shape our consciousness, imaginings, and visions, Narratives guide the spirit and future of possibilities. The act of silencing is a narrative of power, and as Carby insists—and Blain does—“we need to make silences speak.” Remembering Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor.
