Angela Davis, in "The Legacy of Slavery: Standards for a New Womanhood," calls attention to the fact that studies of slavery have for the most part avoided the issue of the effect of slavery specifically upon women. The picture of enslaved women in the white popular consciousness has been marked by distortion and delusion. Women are often assumed mostly to have been "house servants," but the reality was that—especially in the Deep South, where, as Davis indicates, the slaveocracy was most entrenched—the overwhelming majority of enslaved women were forced to work in the fields alongside the men. Black women, after the ban on the international slave trade went into effect, were also especially valued as "breeders" and, while pregnant, were made to do manual field labor, despite their condition. The frequency of rape of enslaved women, and the fact that it was rape, has historically been glossed over or denied outright. The benign term "miscegenation" was typically used to imply that these relationships were consensual, when in fact they were not.
Davis states that even those whites who were part of the abolitionist movement distorted the facts about enslaved women. She calls attention to the unrealistic depiction of Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Harriet Beecher Stowe, says Davis, had little understanding of the effects of slavery on women and depicted Eliza as having a gentle and docile passivity, which would make her a sympathetic character in white women's eyes. Such literature denied or negated the actual qualities of strength and defiance black women have possessed during the period of slavery and after it.
Warsan Shire's "What We Have" compresses into a poetic format similar points to those of Davis. The speaker is a black woman whose strength is a necessity under the conditions in a racist society, where black men are frequently persecuted and taken away from the women. The poem is a lucid and stark description of both of the burden of loss imposed upon black women and a still-triumphant spirit, in which the speaker concludes,
The only darkness we should allow into our lives is the night, and even then, we have the moon.
Angela Davis essentially argues that the conditions faced by black women under slavery, in which they were the victims of oppression on two fronts—their race and their gender—still influences their conditions today. As she observes, proportionately "more Black women have always worked outside their homes than have their white sisters." Enslaved women, most of whom were laborers, suffered the same abuses as men in that capacity. As women, however, they were also the victims of rape and other forms of "sexual coercion." This, along with the fact that slavery tended to deny the masculinity of male slaves by not recognizing them as the heads of their respective households, led historians and politicians to embrace the notion that slavery and its consequences destroyed the institution of the black family. Davis, however, like many recent historians of slavery, emphasizes the agency of enslaved women in resisting the dehumanizing aspects of slavery. Their day-to-day resistance, Davis argues, ought to inform modern struggles for equality by black women:
These women. . . passed on to their nominally free descendants a legacy of hard work, perseverance, and self-reliance, a legacy of tenacity, resistance, and insistence on sexual equality—in short, a legacy spelling out standards for a new womanhood.
Poet Warsan Shire addresses many of these issues in a modern context, claiming, as a black woman, that "our men do not belong to us." Rather, they belong to the violent world that exists outside their homes, where they are murdered and imprisoned. The condition of black women is therefore always tinged with sadness, just as it was under slavery. However, Shire asks the following rhetorical question: is simply mourning their condition the reason black women exist? She urges them to understand the power they have and to embrace the joy they find and indeed create within their homes. "The only darkness we should allow into our lives is the night," she concludes, "and even then, we have the moon." Like their enslaved ancestors, the black struggle to maintain their own humanity is resistance that ought to be celebrated.
http://poetrysociety.org.uk/poems/what-we-have/
https://savingourblackmen.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/davis-legacy.pdf
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