Ophelia de Vere

  Certain type of history books love neat categories. The Civil Rights Movement? Black men in suits. Second-wave feminism? White women with placards. But the women who lived at the intersections—Chicanas, Black women, Indigenous women or more generally immigrant women—are harder to fit into into those narratives. The consequence: More often than not, they became marginalised - even by movements they helped to carry. By the 1980s, those margins started speaking in their own register. The word we —so central to political manifestos—suddenly felt exclusionary. We women usually meant white and middle-class. We Black activists often meant male. The fix wasn’t to abandon solidarity, but to reimagine it. Out of this came a new political category: women of color . Not a demographic box, but a coalition. A way of saying difference can be the foundation of collective strength. Morrison’s Experiment in Uncertainty Toni Morrison understood the fragility of categories better than anyone. I...