Summary Of Sylvia Witts-Vitale's Growing Up Negro

During the formative years of the Women’s Liberation movement, women artists began to develop a collective voice against gender inequality, and many artists chose to infuse their art with their personal experiences of womanhood. “The personal is political” became a slogan taken up by feminists regarding their art and their dissatisfaction with various social constructs. The paring allowed women artists to showcase their individual experience in the context of womanhood as well the varying issues women are confronted with. Many of these artists/writers depicted the intersectionality of these issues—for example; race, ethnicity, bodies, sex and sexuality – within their art and present them as equal to their identity as a woman. For many of these artists, the problem is visibility and how they seek, confront or challenge it as woman. Women artists did not receive an incredible amount of visibility in general so many feminist artists had to be strategic about

By bringing personal, intimate arguments about womanhood into an art space the artist can challenge the audience to view her and her experiences differently. Sylvia Witts-Vitale in her article “Growing Up Negro” describes being pinned between a developing Women’s Movement that isolated Black women, and the Black National movement that used sexist rhetoric to support yielding to Black men. Before the theory of intersectionality was thought and recognized, Black women, ignored by mainstream’s the civil rights movements, occupied a space in society where they faced both anti-black racism and sexism in cohesion. They created their own spaces, such as the National Black Feminist Organization to give their unique experiences a voice. Vitale writes, “To be black in America is to be politically aware of my past, present, and future.” She describes the