I just received a copy of a new book published by SUNY Press: Sisters Outside: Radical Activists Working for Women Prisoners by Jodie Michelle Lawston. Lawston is a sociologist at DePaul, and her book examines issues that arise when activists on the outside advocate for incarcerated women. I’m excited to read it–I think it will speak to conflicts of white privilege that have arisen for me locally when I’ve worked with prison support committees (albeit, on a much smaller scale). Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence has a Tools for Liberation packet which discusses the qualities of being an ally, especially how a white person cannot name herself an ally to persons of color–that is a distinction that must be coined by a POC on a context-by-context basis. This means we may be considered allies for a specific action, but we must not assume that we will automatically be considered allies thereafter. That kind of trust is hard to earn.
I don’t work on prison issues on a regular basis, but I have participated in a couple of actions in my adopted hometown. A few years ago two black men were arrested for assaulting a white police officer. There were extenuating circumstances, and one of the men was a minor in our neighborhood. Neither men could afford private counsel, so we got one lawyer to work pro bono and another to work fairly cheaply, and we raised funds for legal fees and commissary funds. I don’t think I ever felt my white, middle-class privilege more than the day I drove out to the county jail, cash in hand, to make a commissary donation. I didn’t even know what commissary meant–I had to stupidly ask at the committee meeting when volunteers were being solicited. I’m a WNP: white non-prisoner. My naivety was apparent that evening, and I’ve never forgotten it.
Although a quick glance at the index shows no reference to Audre Lorde, Lawston’s title echoes Sister Outsider, Lorde’s 1984 collection of prose written between ’76 and ’84. Her open letter to Mary Daly in 1979 is included in the collection. In that letter she speaks of her anger and dismay at Daly’s failure to not only discuss women of color in her book Gyn/Ecology, but also at Daly’s erasure of women of color by writing about white women’s history and traditions as if they represent all women.
This letter is now considered a primary text for women’s studies in the 1980′s because it holds white feminists accountable for their use of the word women as if it were a unified concept without race and class. Lorde writes, “[T]he oppression of women knows no ethnic or racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences” and that “beyond sisterhood there is still racism” (70). I’m excited to read Sisters Outside because it’s going to look at racial privilege, prison abolition issues, and how individuals who have never been incarcerated can still be effective advocates from the outside. I’ll post a review later.
