"WHAT MAKES this collection distinctive', note ac or their cescendanic. mount its crisis of accumulation e.g. through Thatcherite strategies, workers too struggle for an outcome more favourable to them.
These struggles inevitably take place in the community over housing, policing, education, health and social security. The community is as important an arena for class struggle as are work-place disputes over pay and working hours.
Neither is the home a sanctuary from oppression. There is a fashionable belief that black men beat black women because they themselves have been brutalised by unemployment and other forms of racism.
This is flatly rejected by Amina Mama who insists that "The question of where this leaves oppressed black women remains unanswered'.
Case histories
Through case histories of black women from different ethnic and class backgrounds, Mama records in Woman Abuse the ugly scenes and blighted lives of women ridiculed, beaten, raped and mentally tortured.
This study contradicts the Euro-feminist analysis of domestic violence which relates it to women's economic marginalisation and dependence on their partner's income.
The abusive men were themselves dependent on many of the women interviewed here. If not for financial support, then for housing and their other needs.
Money problems, sexual insecurities and misogynistic attiCaribbean women are the sometimes forgotten voices at the centre of the suffering in racist Britain tudes recur as themes in the inter-relationship between these men and their partners.
Compounding all of this is the abject failure of state agencies like courts, local authorities, hospitals and the police to look after the interests of black Courts have awarded custody of children to the abusive (male) parent. Hospitals have allowed assailants of battered women to visit them.
Forced out
Women have been forced to leave their own council tenancies and then spend months in refuges or filthy bed and breakfast accommodation.
The role of the police comes in for particular criticism. We are reminded that black women would be reluctant to approach the police authorities because of racist policing in their communities.
After all it was the near-fatal shooting of Cherry Groce and the fatal assault on Cynthia Jarrett by policemen which sparked the Broadwater Farm uprising in 1985.
In one situation the policeman asked the battered and bleeding woman to sit in their van with her assailant and sort their problems out. She was told to 'kiss and make up'.
Another incident was when they chanted, 'Eenie meenie minie mo, catch a nigger by the toe, while they decided who to arrest. Finally it was the woman who was arrested and taken to the station where she was racially taunted and assaulted by the police officers before being released the following day.
Many believe as Black Women and the Policenotes, that where the police are in-. volved, 'if either the woman or the man is black, the entire case may become one not of protecting the woman but of an immigration investigation.
Finding themselves at the sharp end of racism as well as sexism and homophobia, Claudette Williams affirms that black women are 'a natural part of many different struggles'.
In Black Women Organising the early struggles are chronicled. From when the community was trying to find its feet and helped each other to raise money for mortgages and for social support, women had gendered roles.
Their part was in food preparation and accounting while it was the men who were in the public sphere.
Newspaper
Women like the Trinidadborn Claudia Jones, did their best to change attitudes within the black community. She founded the first community newspaper, the West Indian Gazette.
The rise of the Black Power and Women's Liberation Movements enthused many black women. However they found their concerns marginalised by both.
Black radicals even of the revolutionary variety felt that racial oppression needed struggling against to the exclusion of other oppression.
Political questions like childcare, sexuality, women's participation and free, safe and legal abortion were sidelined.
In the women's movement Williams recalls, 'there was the inability to acknowledge that racism shapes and is a fundamental part of the experiences of black women'.
In 'reclaim the night' marches, white women marched through predominantly black communities demanding 'better policing' insensitive to black womens' feelings.
Once again the need for autonomous self-organisation surfaced. 'It is only those who are oppressed who are best equipped to liberate themselves. No one else can do it'.
The Black women's movement was born and it lived through groups like the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD) and dozens of black womens collectives.
There are no magic formulations to iron out the contradictions within our communities. The crucial point is to assert that we recognise no 'hierarchies of oppres sion'.
Sexism, racism and class exploitation interlock to oppress black women. All of them need to be recognised and challenged simultaneously.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No.61, April 30, 1994, Page 12 Socialist