Voices of Our Foremothers

I am quite disappointed that this will be the last time I blog for this class. I had never blogged prior to this class and now I have become quite fond of it. I have enjoyed reading all about African-American women and their literacies and discussing my opinions on them. My last blog will be on Voices of Our Foremothers by Sunny-Marie Birney.

Birney is an African-American woman who was adopted by people of European descent. Her essay Voices of Our Foremothers discusses and explains how she used her “foremothers” of education to guide her in life. She discusses how she was thankful for being adopted, but at the same time she felt like a motherless child because she was disconnected from her culture. She also discusses her relationships with her female African-American teachers and how they helped guide and became some of her foremothers. She explained how each one helped her become the woman that she is today and she thanks them. She also pays tribute to other African-American female educators such as Mary McLeod Bethune, Emma Wilson and Lucy Laney.

I directly related to this article because I want to become a teacher. In this article Birney talked about educators I had not heard of, for example Ms. Emma Wilson. I did not know that she was the founder of Ms. Bethune’s elementary school and Ms. Bethune is someone who I consider to a be a foremother. After reading this essay I can add another to list. I also directly related to this article because like Birney I want to be able to teach young African-Americans about their history, I want them to be informed and be able to know that they come from greatness.

Hidden Lessons

“Negative status for Black American females … need to be examined for greater understanding. (page 41)” Many times we take in the negative experiences of our life and think nothing more of it. We often times view it as just another mishap in our lives, because we ultimately expect it to happen. We never think about the effect that it actually has on us. As Lillie Gayle Smith says in her essay, “Unearthing Hidden Literacy: Seven Lessons I Learned in a Cotton Field,” she never really thought about her actual life experiences and the positive aspects of it until it was really brought to her attention in a Black Women’s Literacy Class. Just as Smith only stated her past experiences when it was used for boasting, we do the same thing. She did not see the positive connection between life and the cotton field. This is not all her fault though. Many African Americans are unsure of what should and should not be seen as positive so they automatically assume that what is seen as negative in one place is seen as negative all the way around. As an individual, we have to think about all aspects of a situation, whether it be negative or positive, and how we can use them as lessons in our everyday life.

As Simple as A Knife and Fork

“Lessons From Down Under: Reflections on Meanings of Literacy and Knowledge from an African-American Female Growing Up In Rural Alabama” is an essay by Bessie House-Soremekun that explains how she viewed literacy growing up in Alabama. In this essay she describes why literacy among African-Americans is important, the informal and formal literacies of the American South and how each have impacted her. She explains that literacy is a big part of her life because everyone in her family is literate and promoted it. Her mother, grandmother and uncle were all school teachers and her father was a military man. They all went to college and wanted their children to do the same. She talks about coming from a large close knit family and explains that African-American literacies begin at home with oral storytelling (informal literacy). She also goes on to explain how the informal literacy she learned at home helped her to understand the “formal” literacy that led to the unwritten rules of the south.

House-Soremekun spends a lot of time with her grandmother who is also named Bessie. Her grandmother was born and raised in the late 1800’s. In her essay she re-tells multiple stories that her grandmother has told her, but the one that stood out to me the most was the one her great grandfather. After being emancipated the first thing House-Soremekun’s great grandfather did was go out and by himself a knife and fork; something that he was deprived of because he was a slave. He and the other slaves were forced to eat from troughs with the pigs with no utensils. By not giving them utensils the slave owners were enforcing the fact African-Americans were barbarians. This made me think about my life today. Many of my friends tease me because I eat just about everything with a knife and fork. They call me “proper” and make jokes like “afraid to get your hands a little dirty?” I used to get upset, but after reading this I will not because my ancestors did not have any utensils at all. I feel truly blessed because I have the choice to use a knife and fork. It may seem silly but, this was something African-Americans were unable to do before.

Dysfunctional Literacies



In “Dysfunctional Litereacies of Exclusion: An Exploration of the Burdens of Literacy in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions,” Mandi Chikombero discusses two types of literacy. The two types of literacies that he discusses are traditional literacy and colonial/modern literacy. Chikombero uses the characters in Nervous Conditions as examples. The examples that he gives elaborates on the backgrounds of most African Americans. The chapter explains that traditional literacy is the foundation for colonial literacy because it begins in the home. He  proves that in most cases traditional literacy has a lot to do with race and gender. In the Black race, most men are seen to have modern literacy. If you are a female that is literate, it is hard for you to display your knowledge without criticism. Through the quote, “Literature…is a reflection of society” (p. 150), he says that he is describing the society in which we live today. I completely agree with him on his observations and examples.

Good Ole Bill's PRWORA

“Black and on Welfare: What You Don’t Know About Single-Parent Women” is a wonderful essay written by Sandra Golden that describes her experiences being on government assistance, her studies on it and as well as her research on it. Her essay argues that majority of women on governmental assistance programs have low academic literacy, but are very high social literacy. This meaning that even though they are undereducated or uneducated all together, that they still understand and can describe the injustices and

discrmination that they face being on welfare. Her studies prove this.

One of her first research groups dealt with black women affected by Bill Clintons “end of welfare as we know it.” It was called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). This act was created to “provide assistance to needy families so that children can be taken care of in their own homes or in the homes of relatives; to end dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work and marriage; to prevent and reduce out of wedlock babies and encourage the formation and maintence of two parent families.” (Golden 29) Reading this quote disgusted me and made me feel like a moocher and I am not even on government assistance. If you ask me the government does more harm than “assistance.” It does not stop there though. Every person affected under the PRWORA is assigned a self-sufficiency coach that is supposed to help them with job training and budgeting, but these “coaches” do more harm than good as well.

Many of the women in her study felt disrespected and belittled by these “coaches.” “The participants also believed the disrespect was a manifestation of social perceptions that individuals on public assistance are uneducated and lazy.” (Golden 30) The coaches were there to help these women pick up their lives so that they would not need to be on public assistance anymore. They felt that because the women had little to no academic literacy that they did not want to better themselves. The coaches were supposed to be setting them up for success not failure. How can the United States government want people to do better for themselves and their children if they do not give them the proper resources?

Ms Celie's Journey

My friends and I often joke that you are not considered black until you have seen “The Color Purple.” As a child I remember falling asleep on the movie because t was so long. I did not begin to fully understand the movie until middle school when I picked up the book and began to read it. It was when I actually read the words that I began to piece together the main character Celie’s life. After reading the book, every time I watched the movie I began to fully understand her journey and struggle with literacy.

Celie is the main character in Alice Walker’s novel turned movie, The Color Purple. The Color Purple
described what it meant to be in the early part of 20^th century in the rural American south. At a young age Celie is raped by her stepfather, bares him two children and is given away in an arranged marriage to a man with children. All through Celie’s life she is made to feel as though she is nothing. From a young age she was constantly told that she was ugly and dumb so she grew up to believe that. She was always comparing herself to other women and downgrading her appearance. With the help of her husbands mistress and her estranged sister Nettie, Celie becomes literate and breaks free from her chains of oppression.

In the essay “Women and Literacy in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple,” the author E. Yvette Walters describes the five major literary categories that women find themselves and how Celie goes through each category to become an active literate woman. The first category is silence. It is when a woman hears everything around her, but does think of herself as being capable to understand it. The next stage is received knowledge and that is when a woman can comprehend what is being said , but will not speak out of fear of sounding dumb or stupid. The third category is when a woman starts becoming aware of who she is and what she wants to become. The fourth category is understanding what is right is not always right and relying on you and those around you to find out what is right. The final category is separation of their thoughts from her thoughts so that she has her opinions about life, which is essentially what a literate person is. I enjoyed reading this article because I was able to look at one of my favorite movies and understand the main character better.

Women In Films

Films help suggest Black people and their culture in past eras. “Because Black women still live within the barriers that mainstream American society organizes through decisions made on the basis of skin color, language, financial background, and educational preparations, it is sometimes difficult to construct the social circumstances within which a Black female character is depicted in a movie (Dowdy 164). As you all know, the media is and has always been the most influential of all sources of knowledge. They have influenced for years and years. Although this is a positive thing, the negative to this situation is that the media has been evoking the same images since the beginning. These images have not totally been representative of each and everything that there is to represent. Why does most film covers or cases suggest to the consumer that the movie that they are about to watch is about a Black woman that is low-literate (Dowdy 174)? This is a result of the images that have been embedded in the mindsets of both White and Black people by means of the media. Even though there are hard-working, intelligent, and talented women in the world, there is a failure to represent them, because of this continuous cycle.