Black-Women―Our Time Has Come

In this decade of change, this year of new beginnings, and this amazing time of walls and barriers coming down, our time has finally come.  The African-American woman finally has a public voice of her own.  So in celebration of Women’s History Month, and with the help of the good people at D.C. Cable, we are making history of our own with the launching of our new television show, The Point. This is one of the first television news shows composed of women of color dealing not with song, dance or comedy, but with news and views that matter.

African-American women are a group of 19 million people, and we make up 7 percent of the U.S. population.  We also make up 60 percent of the total black vote and are the Democrats’ most loyal voting bloc.

We know that African-American buying power in the United States is $700 billion annually and, yes, African-American women control a tremendous amount of that spending power.  Women of color are gaining political, economic and, of course, spiritual power daily, but you would not know that from our twisted, perverted images that are regularly transmitted through the media.

When Don Imus insulted the black women on the Rutgers basketball team, men came to our defense and white women held news conferences to voice their outrage.  However, black women had no platform to voice our feelings.  Others talked about us, some talked for us, but we had no place to talk about ourselves.  We were voiceless and invisible.  Now our time has come.

In this crucial election year, for the first time we have an African-American man and a woman running for the highest office in the nation.  Both candidates are great choices over President Bush, who should have been impeached for his mishandling of the Iraqi war and the scandal of Hurricane Katrina.  For African-American women, the choice between a woman and an African-American—something I never thought would happen—creates tension and a tug of war of the soul. So often when blacks are victorious, it means black men, and when women are victorious, it means Caucasian women. So what does the race of U.S. Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton mean for African-American women?

To discuss this and more with me are members of The Point:  Ella Coleman, publisher of Purpose magazine, Valencia Mohammed; star reporter for the Afro-American newspaper; and guest panelist Attorney E. Faye Williams, who heads the National Political Congress of Black Women.

Factoids for graphics: 

Fourteen African-American women serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.  In 1968, New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman elected to the House of Representatives; and in 1972, she became the first African-American woman to vie for President of the United States on the Democratic ticket.  Senator Carol Moseley Braun, who represented Illinois from 1993-1999, was the first and last African-American female senator.