OPINION | 'Practical Audacity': On Writing About Black Women and the Future of Human Rights

by Reagan Jackson

As we slide into April, I find myself chafing at the idea that Black history and women's history should only be relegated to one month. Consider this part of my contribution to uplift Black women's stories all day every day: I want to amplify the work of someone who has fundamentally shaped my understanding of Black feminism and, generally, the world, my mom, Dr. Stanlie M. James.

Dr. James is a professor emeritus and former vice provost of community and inclusion at Arizona State University. As an undergrad at Spelman College, Dr. James began her study of history and sociology and noticed that what she was learning felt incomplete. Noticeably absent were the stories of Black women, not because they didn't exist or weren't crucial to the history of the world, but because their work and lives were excluded from the canon of what was deemed worth remembering.

She continued her educational journey, studying abroad in Ghana and later earning a Master of Arts in British colonial history in West Africa from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, followed by a second Master of Arts in international studies and, subsequently, a doctorate from the University of Denver. An academic to the core, she dedicated her career to building out and uplifting African, African American, and women's studies, and her work continues to inform and inspire the next generation of those of us trying to discern how to show up as powerful Black women in the world. When I was a kid, her mentor, Dr. Florencia Mallon, who is a giant in the field of Latin American studies, tried to explain why my mother's work was so important. She said that while my mother did not publish as much as other academics, when she published, her work fundamentally changed the conversation in her field. Now, as a grown-up, I understand more what Dr. Mallon meant.

Dr. James has written and co-edited several books that are considered a part of the indelible canon of Black women's studies, including Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women; Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood: Disputing U.S. Polemics; and Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women's Studies. Her writing on genital cutting gave African women a voice when most of the people talking about that issue were doing so from outside of the impacted communities. She also uplifted the voice of an intersex person who was medically castrated as a child and revealed the secret of U.S. hospitals' practice of gender reassignment surgeries for babies whose genitals blurred the line. Dr. James' framework of "other-mothering," which was first published in Theorizing Black Feminism, is essential to how I view and facilitate mentorship and co-creating communities of belonging in my work with Young Women Empowered.

During the pandemic, Dr. James released what is her most groundbreaking scholarship yet, called Practical Audacity: Black Women and International Human Rights. In it, she provides a valuable framework for the evolution of the Civil Rights Movement into the human rights movement, positioning Black women at the forefront.

Practical Audacity is a master class on intersectional human rights and elevates the stories of 14 incredible African American and African women engaged in a range of human rights activities: Loretta Ross, Dzon Dixon, Jaribu Hill, Linda Burnham, Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, Patricia Viseur Sellers, Gay McDougall, Adrien Wing, Lisa Crooms-Robinson, Hope Lewis, Catherine Powell, Filomina Steady, Ayesha Imam, and Barbara Phillips. Each of these women is so amazing that they could easily have entire books written about their work, but in choosing to tell their stories in this way, Dr. James is able to show the ways in which many of these women did work that overlapped and strengthened the work of the others.

When asked what inspired the book, Dr. James credited Loretta Ross, whose story is featured. Ross and James met 30 years ago at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where James was a professor. Ross had been granted a residency through the Sociology Department. The intention was to provide activists with respite and space to think about their work. Ross and James met for breakfast.

"She was telling me about who she was and what she was doing. Her story is so amazing, even then, those many years ago, that I was just blown away," said Dr. James.

Loretta Ross got her start at the Washington, D.C., Rape Crisis Center (the first such center in the country), where she volunteered during the '70s and worked her way up to being the director. During her teenage years, she was a victim of incest and gave birth to a son. Then, afterward, she ended up being implanted with a defective IUD that caused her sterilization, along with about 7,000 other women. Her reproductive life only spanned seven years in total, but it shaped the purpose of her activism. "That was the introduction to having or not having reproductive autonomy, not being able to make a decision as to if I had sex or what would happen as a consequence of that sex," Ross said in an interview with me and Anastacia-Rene on the Deep End Friends podcast.

Ross has since become an icon of reproductive justice and women's human rights, winning a MacArthur Genius Award; writing and publishing numerous books, including Calling In the Calling Out Culture; and teaching around the world. She founded the National Center for Human Rights Education in Atlanta in 1996 and later went on to co-found SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. Over the past five decades, she has been instrumental in building liberatory movements blurring the boundaries between social justice, reproductive freedom, and human rights.

Dr. James was so impressed with Ross' work on reproductive rights that she invited her to write a chapter for Theorizing Black Feminism. "This was before she started writing, so we talked about it and I coached her through it," recounted Dr. James. "I think that was her first piece, and she decided she loved to write and her writing just took off from there."

When asked about the process of writing Practical Audacity, Dr. James shared: "It was fits and starts, because meanwhile, I'm teaching, they asked me to chair Afro American Studies, and it was fractious. I was dealing with that and being a mother, plus I didn't have any money. I had some names of people that I was interested in interviewing, but nobody knew me."

She said one woman refused to be interviewed because she thought it was a hoax. But Ross agreed to be interviewed. Dr. James interviewed Ross for five hours at her home in Atlanta, and from there, used an approach common to sociology by sourcing additional potential people to interview from her first subject. Ross gave her a list of people to connect with.

One of Dr. James' respondents suggested she apply for a grant from the Ford Foundation. "So I wrote them a letter and told them what I wanted to do and asked for some funding to do it. I sent it off, and for 18 months, I didn't hear a word. It's like I dropped it in a void," she recounted.

Then one day, the phone rang, and it was Barbara Phillips (who was later interviewed and included in the book), a program manager for the Ford Foundation, which ended up granting Dr. James $100,000. James used the grant to travel around the world to conduct the interviews.

"The book is a result of recognizing that people are engaged in this from their own particular situation. There is something that they see as a human wrong … let's call it that … and they think something should be done about it, and oftentimes, this falls under the auspices of human rights," explained Dr. James. "Because the thing about human rights is it's not set and it's not finite. It continues to evolve as it receives more information of what I'll call human beings in humanity to each other."

Dr. James says defining human rights isn't easy. "It's an international process of determining what are objectionable behaviors by governments towards their people … this is my own definition. And the international community after World War II, and the camps that were discovered where Jews were annihilated, decided that this could not happen again, and they needed to figure out how, as an international community of nations, how to put together something that reflected our commitment to making this a better world."

In 1948, there was a conference to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in collaboration with the founding of the United Nations. "So they actually came up with, eventually, what we call a tryptic of human rights, and the centerpiece is the Universal Declaration. And then there are two covenants, one on either side. One is about the civil and political rights that we all have, and the other side is about social, economic, and cultural rights," said Dr. James. "What you have is these basic early contemporary documents that is beginning the process of defining what human rights is, and then from there, we went to setting up conventions."

In discussing human rights, Dr. James centers Black women because that is the focus of her scholarship, but what can be learned from her work is applicable for anyone wanting to make the world a better place.

"In my mind, I was thinking that we went through this process academically of looking at civil rights from a male perspective. It was all about the big men, Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael … and it took us a while to recognize that there were women, Black women and others too, who were also very deeply engaged in the Civil Rights Movement," said Dr. James. "At some point, some of us came to the realization that we needed more than civil and political rights, because it's not resolving the problems that we're facing in this country, and that we have allies across this country, across the world, that we don't know about who are facing similar problems."

In true intersectional fashion, those most impacted by oppression are often best suited to posit solutions, and the work that the women featured in Practical Audacity are doing is the blueprint for a better world.

"You can look at the work of Filomina Steady and you can look at the work of Ayesha Imam in particular. These are Black women who happen to be African women, but who are engaged in addressing the issues of women's oppression from different perspectives and also at the grassroots level on up through the international level. They have a lot to teach us. And they have had an impact on international human rights," said Dr. James.

I'm so grateful for all that I've learned from my mom and her work and to be a part of her lineage, contributing what I can to curating healing spaces for community. Practical Audacity is available wherever books are sold.

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