The Importance of Different Literacies

Dr. Bessie House-Soremekun grew up in Lanett, Alabama with her family who all valued education. From her grandmother Bessie to her parents, she was able to learn different literacies. Growing up, one of her literacies was that of learning the bible and learning about God. It could have been called religious literacy in which she learned from attending church. Because, Dr. House-Soremekun grew up in quite a large family, she was able to learn not only from her parents but from her grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins. She points out how storytelling was a big part of how she learned. Her grandmother would give her knowledge of other literacies that her father learned as a slave. It was interesting that the most important literacy that he learned was that of knowing how to use eating utensils since he was not able to eat with them as a slave. Another literacy that she learned from her grandmother was that of succeeding in life. This is very important. Because blacks were being oppressed, there was a lot that we were not able to do. We were inferior to whites, and they wanted to keep it that way. No matter what, whites tried everything to keep the blacks from gaining any type of knowledge because like Dr. House-Soremekun said “knowledge is power”. They allowed blacks to learn with books, but those books were the ones with missing information and were outdated. Blacks were addressed by their first names while they had to say “Mr. and Mrs.” to whites. 

Reading about Dr. Bessie House-Soremekun’s life and her learning of different literacies shows how blacks have definitely come along way. She took what she learned from her grandmother’s life and her owns and succeeded in life. Although she was always being categorized, she showed how powerful and strong black people and black women are. She is a great model of how we as black women should be no matter how many times people try to bring us down. This is a very inspirational story. 

Looking Deeper, Changing Perspectives

            Sandra Golden recalls her experiences as a 20 year old pregnant woman, with multiple problems, and many fears about life, as she begins her article entitled “Black and on Welfare: What You Don’t Know About Single- Parent Women”.  I was immediately drawn to the realness of the article, particularly as Golden began to explore negative connotations that society often connects to public assistance, commonly known as welfare. Golden asserts that many welfare recipients are not complacent, lazy, and abusing the system. Instead, her view is that welfare serves to assist you as you rebuild your life and is suppose to take steps to ensure stability through work training and placement programs and the creation of a support system for you.

            This article explores many topics, besides her methodology behind the “stigma” of public assistance.  Golden addresses problems within our system of assistance too. She believes that people are not placed into the proper programs, programs are repeated, and for these reasons and many others, public assistance has not aided in the growth of its recipients as much as it could. What has happened?

            In society today I’m not certain that people understand the meaning of public assistance and what it was created for.  This system was created to help manufacture more independent, self-reliant and stable people by aiding financially. Daily I see people who are in need, so public assistance is a necessity in our society. However, to the extent where people have children to receive more money and are completely abusing a system that was intended to help, it is unfortunate for the people who are truly in need. When this abuse continues to happen, the entire system becomes revamped because tax payers get frustrated because their money is not being used to serve the person who will directly benefit from it.

            Golden really sheds light on how people who may not have achieved high academic literacy levels, are still literate in other ways, including but not limited to survival, communication, and family.  We live in an age where education is pushed and I am definitely an advocate for education and advancing. With this said, it is still important to remember that college is expensive, sometimes support is limited, and everyone does not have the same belief. Sandra Golden wants us to not be so quick to judge but to understand that we all lead very different lives.

Overcoming Archetypes of Black Women on Welfare

In the article, Black and on Welfare: What You Don't Know About Single-Parent Women, Sandra Golden opens with a story about the trials she faced in her experience with welfare as a 20 year-old Black woman while pregnant, unemployed, separated from her husband, and living with her parents.  She uses the words "dehumanized" and "humiliated" when describing how she felt after her experience in a welfare office.

“A Black single parent female utilizes special literacy skills to negotiate with a social context that marginalizes and disenfranchise groups based on gender, race, education, and class.” (Golden 28) 

Golden speaks about young Black women who deal with burns from judgmental eyes.  Assumptions that these women are uneducated or inadequately educated are not the only ideas that are viewed as a common characteristic of the Black women who seek assistance in the welfare office.  People often assume that these women lack the skills and motivation that is necessary to find their way to a better situation in life.  Therefore, these women are given a hard time when they go out and seek help in a welfare office.  Because Black female-headed families have been recognized as inferior to other types of families, unproductive, pathological, and dysfunctional for so long, it is not easy to change those ideas of families headed by single Black women even though many of the situations these women are in do not match the image that was created by the ideas of the past.  Although the purpose of welfare, according to the PRWOPA, is to provide assistance to families in order to avoid unwed pregnancies, end dependence on government benefits, and to promote healthy marriage, it doesn’t seem as if this organization really has the best interest of these families at heart. 

The young Black women who reap the benefits of a welfare program are commonly close to illiterate in terms of formal education but, these women are highly skilled and educated in their respective venues of action.  They put forth a great amount of effort in order to obtain the respect of those around them and even more effort to be the best they can for their families.

A Dialectic Education

In Unearthing Hidden Literacy the author Lillie Gayle Smith discusses how through taking her “Black Woman's Literacy” class she was able to better appreciate her past experience with picking cotton. However, her story of picking cotton was not the only thing that stood out to me. The classroom setting in which she participated is what allowed her to talk about her past and realize that it was nothing to be ashamed of and in fact something to take pride in. 

 In my ADW class we recently discussed the different types of teaching styles that can be experienced in a classroom. The main one we discussed was dialectic. Which is open communication between the students and the teacher. Through dialectic teaching the teacher listens to what the students have to say and embraces their ideas and point of view. This allows for students to express themselves and draw connections between themselves and what they’re learning. And that’s exactly what Lillie Smith experienced.

If it wasn’t for Lillie Smith’s teacher allowing her students to talk and share their stories Smith would have never been able to reach her revelation. She says, “..I would not have disturbed my comfort with memories of repetitive, back-breaking work, which means that I would have ultimately denied myself the awakening that comes only from more fully understanding significant life experiences” (Smith 38). Not only did she help herself, but she was able to bless everyone else in her class as well. 

Here at Spelman College we too participate in a dialectic education which allows us to share our knowledge with one another. Not only do we learn from the teacher, but we also are fortunate enough to learn from our peers. If this was practiced in all classroom settings I believe more people would be able to have experiences similar to Lillie Smith’s. 

Working the Cotton Field

In Unearthing Hidden Literacy, Lillie Gayle Smith talks about the lessons she learned from picking cotton in her aunt's cotton field. Picking cotton reminds us of slavery, and while doing this job Lillie was able to learn more about herself as a person and also as a black woman.

She took up a course in graduate school called Black Women's Literacy. In this course, Ms. Smith "observed examples of women's resistance in a course where the male professor had a gender preference for the males when giving an answer" (Smith 39). Lillie was able to connect what she learned to her life in her past and present. She wanted to forget about her working days in the cotton field but taking this course only made her realize the true meaning and importance of this job. Her mother made her and her brother start to pick cotton because she felt that it would teach them different learning experiences, and it did. Ms. Smith talks about how working in the cotton field made her able to listen to what the elders had to say about valuing education. She was encouraged to do well so that she could have the life that they never had.

It was interesting to see how the author connected the hard labor of picking cotton to her life today. Although she wanted to forget about those days, taking that course made her realized that that job was not only a part of her, but it taught her so much. It taught her about herself and about women in general. Women have had to overcome so many obstacles and black women even more. Having an education means a lot because it empowers black women to do more in their life as far as making decisions that will help them better themselves. The literacies that these women learned were what helped them survive in times of racism and when gender was taken into account.
It is important that we as black women think about the struggles that our ancestors before have went through and what we go through today. Although we are not going through half as much as they went through, we have to remember what makes us who we are. We have to make sure that we learn something from every situation that we are in because that only makes us more knowledgeable of other things making us better African American women.

Our Roles

Joanne Kilgour Dowdy interprets roles of black women in films.  She references “Passion Fish”, “Wit”, “The Color Purple”, “Losing Isaiah”, “The Josephine Baker Story”, “Clara’s Heart”, “Sarafina”, “Music from the Heart”, and “Eve’s Bayou”.  Each of these nine films provides a distinct view of black women.  "The Color Purple" was filmed earliest in 1985.  This film shows the triumph of a young woman who was manipulated and abused.  Nevertheless, she persevered and created opportunities for herself.  Produced in 2001, “Wit” was the latest of the films.  It depicts the story of a black nurse named Sue.  Dowdy’s students viewed Sue as the "invisible character" as she played a key role but was not a main character.

These nine stories reflect the roles that black women play every day in real life.  We learned about the many roles of black women in readings such as “Going Against The Grain” and “To Protect and Serve".  Outside of our educational pursuits in this class, we see the struggles that black women have endured particularly in another class called African Diaspora and The World.  In “Reel Women: Black Women and Literacy In Feature Films” Joanne Dowdy explores ways that symbols help create our world.  Each of the films named above were constructed by a white director.  Therefore, Dowdy had her students use critical analysis when viewing these films, particularly when black characters are in the cast. 

I think that Dowdy wants her students and readers to be aware of how black people, specifically black women are represented by the media.  She uses nine films that were produced over sixteen years to show similarities in the roles black women have played.  In movies, we are often abused, weak, and sometimes incompetent.  When these films are continuously being produced, these images of black women begin to come to life in society and many of the ideas from the films become reality.  Black women can either conform to the expectations of society or use the expectations placed upon us as inspiration to do better and learn more.  We need to create new pictures; positive images that uphold integrity and hard work; images that radiate our beauty.