Say It Plain

Cole has spent a lifetime reaching out to the rest of the world. She fell in love with cultural anthropology while an undergraduate at Oberlin College and earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from Northwestern University in 1964. She has carried out research in Africa and the Caribbean, as well as in the United States. Before joining Spelman, Cole taught at Washington State University, where she struggled in the 1960s to establish a Black Studies program. In 1970, she joined the faculty of the Afro-American Studies Department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, expanding her research in women’s studies and navigating the controversial work of overhauling the general curriculum. Cole spent the early 1980s teaching at Hunter College in New York City. In 1998, Cole left Spelman for a teaching job at nearby Emory University, where she was appointed Presidential Distinguished Professor in Anthropology, Women’s Studies, and African American studies. The triple appointment united Cole’s abiding interests in race, gender, and class—interests formed growing up in the Jim Crow era.

One of Cole’s great early influences was Mary McLeod Bethune. Her great-grandfather was friends with Bethune and was a benefactor of Bethune-Cookman College. Cole’s elders encouraged young Johnetta to grow up to be just like Bethune. Cole says, “It would make great folklore to say that I remember receiving words of wisdom and my calling to education while sitting on the lap of Mary McLeod Bethune. But as a young girl, what I remember most is being mesmerized by the wonderful hats she wore.” ² As she matured, Cole’s appreciation for Bethune’s pioneering work in African American education superseded her awe of the hats.

Cole left Emory in 2001, announcing her retirement from academia. She was pulled back from retirement in 2002, taking the job of president at Bennett College, a small, predominantly black women’s college in Greensboro, North Carolina. Asked in a radio interview if she regretted her return to work, Cole said, “I don’t at all. You know, there’s something so sacred about the kind of work I do. It’s a work of helping young people, and sometimes not such young people, to use education as a means to transform their lives.” ³

WELL, when I walked out here, I knew that whatever it said on the first page of this speech was not what I was going to say first. [laughter] The first thing that I must say to you, my sisters, was of course said by one of the most extraordinary SHEroes in our history. You know that that extraordinary abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth once said, “If the world was really turned upside down once by one woman, I don’t understand why all of these women can’t turn it right side up again.” [applause]

I don’t know that I have ever sensed, as I do at this moment, the unbelievable power that we have. To tell you the truth, it’ll give you chill bumps. But before I try to say all of those things that I feel very, very deeply in my heart and that are running around in my mind and that I think my soul wants released, I have to say it is a thing of beauty what these women have done to organize this conference. [applause] I must tell you that when I first heard of this from Spelman alumna Evelyn Hammond it seemed of course not impossible. Black women do when don’t wants to prevail. But it did seem difficult. But we are here, somewhere, 1,800, 19, 2,000 women strong. Yes we can take a moment from Sterling Brown’s poem, and we can put it in our own image and say, “Strong women who just keep on a-comin’.” So, my sisters, good evening.

I want you to know that it is an extraordinary joy for me to come within this circle; to be of this great gathering of womenfolk, womenfolk of the darker race, women prepared to stand in defense of our righteous and proper name. What an honor it is to have been asked to be in the company of sister professors Angela Davis and Lani Guinier. [applause] When I was asked to give one of the three keynote addresses, I could just say “hmm.” Actually I said, “Mmm, mmm, mmm!” [laughter] Because to be asked to give a keynote address when my sister professors Lani and Angela will have, and will tomorrow do so, says to me that if a woman is known by the company she keeps, I’m doing alright. [applause]

I want to tell you, my sisters, I want to tell you that it was a considerable struggle to try to determine what I could possibly say that would be meaningful. I needed to find something meaningful to say at a gathering where a good percentage of the serious sisters of the academy would have come together and many times over would have presented the sharpest of analyses on how we have been shut out of the academy. What is it, then, that we know and feel so deeply about black women in the academy? If we know anything, or as the old folk would say in the part of the country that I just came from, “If I know my name, I know this!” If I know my name, I know this: that the academy is an intensely accurate mirror of the society in which we live. And so if I know my name, I know that in the academy, like in America—and it is our America—the sister is caught between a mighty rock of racism and an unbelievably hard place of sexism. Now there are a multitude of ways of saying quite simply that things are not well by the sisters, that we black women have got a hard row to hoe. Yet, just as in the larger society, it could well be that it is we, African American women, who have the best chance of being change agents, the greatest possibility of transforming the academy and in some long-term and ultimate sense, even transforming America.

Come with me now my sisters and let me stretch out on these points. Each and every one of us ain’t the same black woman, found in exactly the same place, doing exactly the same thing. And so I must ask, when we speak of black women in the academy, who you talking ’bout? Do you mean the black women—fewer than you can count on one hand—who serve as presidents of so-called majority institutions? Or do you mean the substantial number of black women who can be found in majority and minority institutions, cleaning the bathrooms in the dormitories, [applause] cooking food for campus dining halls? Now, I don’t know what you mean, but when I say “black women in the academy,” I mean all these sisters. [applause]

When we gather, my sisters, when we gather here, when we gather here to defend her name, is it the name of sister professor so-and-so of suchand-such history department? Or is it the sister’s secretary who wordprocesses all day long for the professors, all of them, in that history department? I have the feeling—I just got here—but I have the feeling that we will insist on defending both of their names. [applause]

So I am asking a very basic yet important question. When we refer to black women in the academy, do we remember to take into account the considerable—no, the extraordinary diversity among us, as well as the shared experiences that bind us one to the other? Precisely because we African American women are the victims of racism and sexism that turns all of us into homogenized globs of racial and gender stereotypes, precisely because we are the victims of those two systems of inequality, we dare not ignore the diversity among ourselves. For within the academy, as in American society at large, we will never fully comprehend who we are, nor can we effectively struggle against the totality of our oppressions, until we confront the reality that all black women are not of the same class, are not of the same sexual orientation, are not of the same religious faiths, are not of the same age groups or physical abilities.

I insist on this point. And yes, I made it in the textbook All-American Women. But you know, when you get a good point, it’s worth making it again and again and again. Somebody told me the other day, as I feared that I was going to talk once again about issues of diversity, the sister said, “Don’t worry, it’s alright, when it comes to education,” she said, “repetition is good for the soul.” [laughter]

So, being repetitive, I insist on this point quite simply. Because should I ignore the specificities of who my sister is; or, as we more frequently do, should I simply assume “she’s just like me; she’s a sister.” If I do that, at best I can actually become an instrument of her discomfort. At worst I can become an instrument of her oppression. As the president of Spelman College, I need to be sensitive to the fact that the sister who works in the physical plant division of the college and who, every night during the week, cleans my office, I need to be very aware that we are indeed sisters, but that I have access to opportunities and resources that she does not have access to, and that if I am a president worth her salt, that a part of my agenda must be to make her life and her work better. [applause] We as black women must know our sisterhood and understand that within it we can indeed love each other even when we are not each other.

At Spelman, when faculty or students or staff speak and pray in public, as if everyone at Spelman is a Christian, it is surely a source of discomfort for the Muslim students on our campus, for the women on our campus of other faiths. I don’t think that this is done out of any sense of intended maliciousness. And yet, an insensitivity to differences among us can nevertheless hurt the women that we love. At Spelman, the assumption among many at the college that homosexuality and bisexuality are somehow not normal sexual orientations has to be unusually painful to lesbian and bisexual women who are, after all, a part of a community of women at a women’s college. It is my view that any expression of homophobia oppresses all of us. [applause]

There are still other ways in which some of us in the academy express insensitivity to other black women. For example, on campuses such as mine and ours—it’s called Spelman, actually it’s yours, it belongs to every black woman—on a campus that has a tradition of welcoming and educating and empowering African American women roughly between the ages of 18 and 22, do we really present a welcoming for older women? Are we really sensitive to what it is like for women with children who passionately want an education? On your campus, in what ways do you reach out to women who are differently-abled? We’re discovering at Spelman now just how rewarding and how complicated it is to welcome to our campus African American women who are visually impaired, African American women who are deaf, African American women with a range of different abilities. What is clear is that we must not only make sure that the ramps are up and that the paths are friendly to those who cannot see them but must walk them, we must make sure to engage in a kind of education among those of us who see and hear and walk well—so that the sisterhood becomes large enough to embrace all.

Now I turn to ways in which we, as black women in the academy, are indeed bound together by our shared experiences. You remember Brother Malcolm’s query, “What do you call a black person with a PhD?” Well, it ain’t “Doctor.” But we must ask by what name will she with a PhD be called? Of course we African American women are not the only folks in the academy to experience racism and sexism. With our African American brothers in particular, but with all men and women of color, we know that look that says, “Hello, I guess you’re the affirmative action person.” [applause]

We have in the academy, then, women who, after the end of a full day, go home to the second shift. That means, my sister, it is time—and you ought to move rather rapidly—to cook the food, throw in the wash, put the child to the table and give a hand with the math problems, tidy up the place, “No these socks don’t belong to you, and this doesn’t belong to you either,” but somehow folk don’t seem in charge of their own. You are to call and check on the sick relative, and you know, there’s a particular chapter in his article, it would be awfully nice if you could word-process it up. [laughter and applause]

My sisters, without any intention to set up a contest on oppression, to see which of us can claim that we have the hardest row to hoe, without engaging, then, in that contest on oppression, it is clear that in the academy, as in our nation as a whole, black women know, black women know what it means to be the victims of racism and sexism. For many of us there are those other jeopardies based on our class and our age, our sexual orientation, our physical abilities. In the American academy, life, then, for black women clearly ain’t been no crystal stair.

I want to turn now to the final point that I want to make—actually, make it [the] next two—the possibility that we African American women could become a major force in helping to transform the academy. But how could it be that individuals who are among the most discriminated against might become a major force in helping to address that very discrimination? The core course at Spelman College is no longer Western Civilization. [applause] The core course at Spelman College—struggled for, fought over, indeed some of the major participants, my colleagues, are here, sister professors, I know you are here: Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Gloria Wade Gales, and Mona Phillips, and our provost, Glenda D. Price—the core course at Spelman College is entitled Africa: The Diaspora and the World.

I want to close now on a particular note. Alvin Singleton, a brother who served for two years as a composer-in-residence at Spelman, traveled all over our nation and all over the world, really, during the period of his stay with us. He was often asked—no doubt with something of an anticipation of “ain’t easy being there”—he was often asked, “How are things at Spelman?” Alvin tells me, with the same ingenuity with which he composes, he says he always said, “Things are just fine—you see at Spelman, the sisters are in charge.” [applause]

I must ask—isn’t that what we all work toward? We work for the day when the sisters are in charge of their own intellectual and personal development. And in taking charge, how different it will be, because we will not violate the rights of any others. What a day that will be! What a great gettin’-up morning, when each of us—each and every one of us—has been truly empowered within a community of teacher, scholar, activist. It’s just that wishing it won’t make it so; unfortunately, we’ve got some work to do. My sisters, I am convinced that that work rests unusually heavily upon us. I want to thank you, really very much, for the honor of simply coming to acknowledge what we know about us black women in the academy. I really am grateful for this opportunity to simply reaffirm that which we feel most deeply. And how good it was to have the chance to dream with you of a better academy for each and every one of us. Thank you so much. [applause]