The Angry Black Woman

This blog is awesome: The Angry Black Woman
It’s true that the Angry Black Woman is a negative stereotype. Black men don’t like us, white people fear us, and non-angry black women wish we would stop being so loud. And, as I said, anger isn’t going to solve all of the world’s problems. Anger is very often an unhealthy emotion. However, anger can be used for good. We sometimes need to get angry to propel us toward positive change or to stop injustice and oppression. We can’t stop being angry until the fight is over. And the fight is far from over, kids.

So this is me embracing the anger, the black, and the woman. Condemn me if you will, but just try living my life for a week and tell me there isn’t reason to be angry. I’ll be calm, peaceful, and chill once racism, sexism, and queerism is gone.

I feel that I may never be chill. Prove me wrong.
http://theangryblackwoman.wordpress.com/about/

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Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice

I'm going to get this book:

"We're sick and tired of being sick and tired!" With Fannie Lou Hamer's words as their rallying cry, 1 more than 1,500 African American women gathered at Spellman College in Atlanta for the first National Conference on Black Women's Health Issues in 1983: "They came with PhDs, MDs, welfare cards, in Mercedes and on crutches, from seven days to eighty years old-urban, rural, gay, straight-in desperate search for themselves."2 The conference gave birth to the National Black Women's Health Project (NBWHP),3 the first ever women of color reproductive justice organization and the foremother of the other organizations profiled in this book.

The histories of NBWHP and the other reproductive rights organizations formed by women of color in the 1980s and 90s are stories of activism, courage, and determination that challenge the common belief that communities who have suffered the most from restrictions on reproductive rights do not organize on their own behalf. This book retrieves part of that history by documenting the reproductive rights activism of eight women of color groups in the United States.

Accounts of the reproductive rights struggle in the US have typically focused on efforts to attain and defend the legal right to abortion, efforts led predominantly by white women. What little information is provided about women of color tends to center on the abuses they have suffered and represents only a partial history. Most of the reproductive health organizing done by women of color in the United States has been undocumented, unanalyzed, and unacknowledged. Turning the tide of this limited scholarship, Dorothy Roberts, Linda Gordon, Rickie Solinger, Jennifer Nelson, and others have brought to light both the struggles of women of color to resist reproductive oppression and the roles they have played in the fight for reproductive justice.4 Theirs and similar works have highlighted the external challenges confronting communities of color and constraining their reproduction-population control, sterilization abuse, unsafe contraceptives, welfare reform, the criminalization of women who use drugs and alcohol during pregnancy, and coercive and intrusive family planning programs and policies.5

However, Dorothy Roberts cautions us against seeing women of color as passive puppets.6 Therefore, this book focuses on what women of color have done for themselves, rather than what has been done to them. We put the activism of women of color in the foreground. By adopting this approach we neither discount the devastating consequences of reproductive abuses, nor deny the impact of structural forces such as white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. But these issues are the backdrop for the organizing and do not take center stage. This book utilizes a series of organizational case studies to document how women of color have led the fight to control their own bodies and reproductive destinies and have organized to define and implement a reproductive justice agenda to address the needs of their communities. We selected groups that reflect a wide range of organizing strategies, issues, and challenges from four ethnic communities: African American, Native American/Indigenous, Latina, and Asian and Pacific Islander. To illustrate the range of organizing occurring within communities of color, we included two organizations from each-a national group, more well-known and often with a longer history of organizing, and an organization newer to the work and/or one that is grassroots-oriented. All of the groups varied in size, focus of programmatic activity, and budgets.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2004/10/b641379.html

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