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Praise for the first edition of Black Feminist Thought “The book argues convincingly that black feminists be given, in the words immortalized by Aretha Franklin, a little more R-E-S-P-E-C-T. . . . Those with an appetite for scholarese will find the book delicious.” —Black Enterprise “With the publication of Black Feminist Thought, black feminism has moved to a new level. Collins’ work sets a standard for the discussion of black women’s lives, experiences, and thought that demands rigorous attention to the complexity of these experiences and an exploration of a multiplicity of responses.” —Women’s Review of Books “Patricia Hill Collins’ new work [is] a marvelous and engaging account of the social construction of black feminist thought. Historically grounded, making excellent use of oral history, interviews, music, poetry, fiction, and scholarly literature, Hill proposes to illuminate black women’s standpoint. . . . Those already familiar with black women’s history and literature will find this book a rich and satisfying analysis. Those who are not well acquainted with this body of work will find Collins’ book an accessible and absorbing first encounter with excerpts from many works, inviting fuller engagement. As an overview, this book would make an excellent text in women’s studies, ethnic studies, and African-American studies courses, especially at the upper-division and graduate levels. As a meditation on the deeper implications of feminist epistemology and sociological practice, Patricia Hill Collins has given us a particular gift.” —Signs “Patricia Hill Collins has done the impossible. She has written a book on black feminist thought that combines the theory with the most immediate in feminist practice. Collins’ book is a must for any feminist’s library.” —Rosemarie Tong “Finding her own voice and sharing with us the voices of other African-American women, Collins brilliantly explicates our unique standpoint. As a black feminist, Collins traverses both old and new territories. She explores the familiar themes of oppression, family, work, and activism and also examines new areas of cultural images and sexual politics. Collins gently challenges white feminist dominance of feminist theory and nurtures an appreciation for diversity in positions reflecting different race, class, and gender junctures. Her work is an example of how academics can make their work accessible to the wider public.” —Elizabeth Higginbotham, Professor of Sociology, University of Delaware, and co-editor of Women and Work: Exploring Race, Ethnicity, and Class (Volume 6) REVISED TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment Second Edition Patricia Hill Collins Routledge New York and London Published in 2000 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Copyright © 2000 by Routledge All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Collins, Patricia Hill, 1948– Black feminist thought : knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment / Patricia Hill Collins. — 2nd ed. p. cm. — (Perspectives on gender) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-92483-9 (hb). — ISBN 0-415-92484-7 (pb) 1. Feminism—United States. 2. Afro-American women. 3. United States—Race relations. I.Title II. Series: Perspectives on gender (New York, N.Y.) HQ1426.C633 1999 305.42'01—dc21 99–29144 CIP ISBN 0-203-90005-7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-90009-X (Glassbook Format) CONTENTS Preface to First Edition vi Preface to Second Edition x Acknowledgments xiv Part 1: The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought 1.The Politics of Black Feminist Thought 1 2. Distinguishing Features of Black Feminist Thought 21 Part 2: Core Themes in Black Feminist Thought 3.Work, Family, and Black Women’s Oppression 45 4. Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images 69 5.The Power of Self-Definition 97 6.The Sexual Politics of Black Womanhood 123 7. Black Women’s Love Relationships 149 8. Black Women and Motherhood 173 9. Rethinking Black Women’s Activism 201 Part 3: Black Feminism, Knowledge, and Power 10. U.S. Black Feminism in Transnational Context 227 11. Black Feminist Epistemology 251 12.Toward a Politics of Empowerment 273 Notes 291 Glossary 298 References 302 Index 326 Preface to First Edition W hen I was five years old, I was chosen to play Spring in my preschool pageant. Sitting on my throne, I proudly presided over a court of children portraying birds, flowers, and the other, “lesser” seasons. Being surrounded by children like myself—the daughters and sons of laborers, domestic workers, secretaries, and factory workers—affirmed who I was. When my turn came to speak, I delivered my few lines masterfully, with great enthusiasm and energy. I loved my part because I was Spring, the season of new life and hope. All of the grown-ups told me how vital my part was and congratulated me on how well I had done. Their words and hugs made me feel that I was important and that what I thought, and felt, and accomplished mattered. As my world expanded, I learned that not everyone agreed with them. Beginning in adolescence, I was increasingly the “first,” or “one of the few,” or the “only” African-American and/or woman and/or working-class person in my schools, communities, and work settings. I saw nothing wrong with being who I was, but apparently many others did. My world grew larger, but I felt I was growing smaller. I tried to disappear into myself in order to deflect the painful, daily assaults designed to teach me that being an African-American, workingclass woman made me lesser than those who were not. And as I felt smaller, I became quieter and eventually was virtually silenced. This book reflects one stage in my ongoing struggle to regain my voice. Over the years I have tried to replace the external definitions of my life forwarded by dominant groups with my own self-defined viewpoint. But while my personal odyssey forms the catalyst for this volume, I now know that my experiences are far from unique. Like African-American women, many others who occupy societally denigrated categories have been similarly silenced. So the voice that I now seek is both individual and collective, personal and political, one reflecting the intersection of my unique biography with the larger meaning of my historical times. I share this part of the context that stimulated this book because that context influenced my choices concerning the volume itself. First, I was committed to making this book intellectually rigorous, well researched, and accessible to more PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION vii than the select few fortunate enough to receive elite educations. I could not write a book about Black women’s ideas that the vast majority of African-American women could not read and understand. Theory of all types is often presented as being so abstract that it can be appreciated only by a select few. Though often highly satisfying to academics, this definition excludes those who do not speak the language of elites and thus reinforces social relations of domination. Educated elites typically claim that only they are qualified to produce theory and believe that only they can interpret not only their own but everyone else’s experiences. Moreover, educated elites often use this belief to uphold their own privilege. I felt that it was important to examine the complexity of ideas that exist in both scholarly and everyday life and present those ideas in a way that made them not less powerful or rigorous but accessible. Approaching theory in this way challenges both the ideas of educated elites and the role of theory in sustaining hierarchies of privilege. The resulting volume is theoretical in that it reflects diverse theoretical traditions such as Afrocentric philosophy, feminist theory, Marxist social thought, the sociology of knowledge, critical theory, and postmodernism; and yet the standard vocabulary of these traditions, citations of their major works and key proponents, and these terms themselves rarely appear in the text. To me the ideas themselves are important, not the labels we attach to them. Second, I place Black women’s experiences and ideas at the center of analysis. For those accustomed to having subordinate groups such as African-American women frame our ideas in ways that are convenient for the more powerful, this centrality can be unsettling. For example, White, middle-class, feminist readers will find few references to so-called White feminist thought. I have deliberately chosen not to begin with feminist tenets developed from the experiences of White, middle-class, Western women and then insert the ideas and experiences of African-American women. While I am quite familiar with a range of historical and contemporary White feminist theorists and certainly value their contributions to our understanding of gender, this is not a book about what Black women think of White feminist ideas or how Black women’s ideas compare with those of prominent White feminist theorists. I take a similar stance regarding Marxist social theory and Afrocentric thought. In order to capture the interconnections of race, gender, and social class in Black women’s lives and their effect on Black feminist thought, I explicitly rejected grounding my analysis in any single theoretical tradition. Oppressed groups are frequently placed in the situation of being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for a dominant group.This requirement often changes the meaning of our ideas and works to elevate the ideas of dominant groups. In this volume, by placing African-American women’s ideas in the center of analysis, I not only privilege those ideas but encourage White feminists, African-American men, and all others to investigate the similarities and differences among their own standpoints and those of African-American women. viii BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT Third, I deliberately include numerous quotations from a range of AfricanAmerican women thinkers, some well known and others rarely heard from. Explicitly grounding my analysis in multiple voices highlights the diversity, richness, and power of Black women’s ideas as part of a long-standing AfricanAmerican women’s intellectual community. Moreover, this approach counteracts the tendency of mainstream scholarship to canonize a few Black women as spokespersons for the group and then refuse to listen to any but these select few. While it is certainly appealing to receive recognition for one’s accomplishments, my experiences as the “first,” “one of the few,” and the “only” have shown me how effective selecting a few and using them to control the many can be in stifling subordinate groups. Assuming that only a few exceptional Black women have been able to do theory homogenizes African-American women and silences the majority. In contrast, I maintain that theory and intellectual creativity are not the province of a select few but instead emanate from a range of people. Fourth, I used a distinctive methodology in preparing this manuscript which illustrates how thought and action can work together in generating theory. Much of my formal academic training has been designed to show me that I must alienate myself from my communities, my family, and even my own self in order to produce credible intellectual work. Instead of viewing the everyday as a negative influence on my theorizing, I tried to see how the everyday actions and ideas of the Black women in my life reflected the theoretical issues I claimed were so important to them. Lacking grants, fellowships, release time, or other benefits that allow scholars to remove themselves from everyday life and contemplate its contours and meaning, I wrote this book while fully immersed in ordinary activities that brought me into contact with a variety of African-American women. Through caring for my daughter, mentoring Black women undergraduates, assisting a Brownie troop, and engaging in other “unscholarly” activities, I reassessed my relationships with a range of African-American women and their relationships with one another.Theory allowed me to see all of these associations with fresh eyes, while concrete experiences challenged the worldviews offered by theory. During this period of self-reflection, work on this manuscript inched along, and I produced little “theory.” But without this involvement in the everyday, the theory in this volume would have been greatly impoverished. Fifth, in order to demonstrate the existence and authenticity of Black feminist thought, I present it as being coherent and basically complete. This portrayal is in contrast to my actual view that theory is rarely this smoothly constructed. Most theories are characterized by internal instability, are contested, and are divided by competing emphases and interests.When I considered that Black feminist thought is currently embedded in a larger political and intellectual context that challenges its very right to exist, I decided not to stress the contradictions, frictions, and inconsistencies of Black feminist thought. Instead I present Black feminist thought as overly coherent, but I do so because I suspect that this approach is more appropriate for this historical moment. I hope to see other vol- PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION ix umes emerge which will be more willing to present Black feminist thought as a shifting mosaic of competing ideas and interests. I have focused on the pieces of the mosaic—perhaps others will emphasize the disjunctures distinguishing the pieces of the mosaic from one another. Finally, writing this book has convinced me of the need to reconcile subjectivity and objectivity in producing scholarship. Initially I found the movement between my training as an “objective” social scientist and my daily experiences as an African-American woman jarring. But reconciling what we have been trained to see as opposites, a reconciliation signaled by my inserting myself in the text by using “I,” “we,” and “our” instead of the more distancing terms “they” and “one,” was freeing for me. I discovered that the both/and conceptual stance of Black feminist thought allowed me to be both objective and subjective, to possess both an Afrocentric and a feminist conciousness, and to be both a respectable scholar and an acceptable mother. When I began this book, I had to overcome my reluctance concerning committing my ideas to paper. “How can I as one person speak for such a large and complex group as African-American women?” I asked myself. The answer is that I cannot and should not because each of us must learn to speak for herself. In the course of writing the book I came to see my work as being part of a larger process, as one voice in a dialogue among people who have been silenced. I know that I will never again possess the curious coexistence of naiveté and unshakable confidence that I had when I portrayed Spring. But I hope to recapture those elements of the voice of Spring that were honest, genuine, and empowering. More important, my hope is that others who were formerly and are currently silenced will find their voices. I, for one, certainly want to hear what they have to say. Preface to Second Edition I initially wrote Black Feminist Thought in order to help empower African-American women. I knew that when an individual Black woman’s consciousness concerning how she understands her everyday life undergoes change, she can become empowered. Such consciousness may stimulate her to embark on a path of personal freedom, even if it exists initially primarily in her own mind. If she is lucky enough to meet others who are undergoing similar journeys, she and they can change the world around them. If ideas, knowledge, and consciousness can have such an impact on individual Black women, what effect might they have on Black women as a group? I suspected that African-American women had created a collective knowledge that served a similar purpose in fostering Black women’s empowerment. Black Feminist Thought aimed to document the existence of such knowledge and sketch out its contours. My goal of examining how knowledge can foster African-American women’s empowerment remains intact. What has changed, however, is my understanding of the meaning of empowerment and of the process needed for it to happen. I now recognize that empowerment for African-American women will never occur in a context characterized by oppression and social injustice. A group can gain power in such situations by dominating others, but this is not the type of empowerment that I found within Black women’s thinking. Reading Black women’s intellectual work, I have come to see how it is possible to be both centered in one’s own experiences and engaged in coalitions with others. In this sense, Black feminist thought works on behalf of Black women, but does so in conjunction with other similar social justice projects. My deepening understanding of empowerment stimulated more complex arguments of several ideas introduced in the first edition. For one, throughout this revision, I emphasize Black feminist thought’s purpose, namely, fostering both Black women’s empowerment and conditions of social justice. Both of these themes were in the first edition, but neither was as fully developed as they are here. This enhanced emphasis on empowerment and social justice permeates the revised volume and is especially evident in Chapter 2. There I replace my efforts PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION xi to “define” Black feminist thought with a discussion that identifies its distinguishing features. This shift allowed me to emphasize particular dimensions that characterize Black feminist thought but are not unique to it. It also created space for other groups engaged in similar social justice projects to recognize dimensions of their own thought and practice. I tried to reject the binary thinking that frames so many Western definitions, including my earlier ones of Black feminist thought and of Black feminist epistemology. Rather than drawing a firm line around Black feminist thought that aims to classify entities as either being Black feminist or not, I aimed for more fluidity without sacrificing logical rigor. My analysis of oppression is also more complex in this edition, in part because neither empowerment nor social justice can be achieved without some sense of what one is trying to change. Whereas both editions rely on a paradigm of intersecting oppressions to analyze Black women’s experiences, this edition provides a more comprehensive treatment. Race, class, and gender studies were being established when I wrote the first edition. Just as this area of inquiry has greatly expanded since that writing, so has my treatment of this framework. For example, in this edition, I broaden my analysis beyond race, class, and gender and include sexuality as a form of oppression. Issues of social class and culture also receive a more complex analysis in this edition. The first edition was especially concerned with issues of Black culture yet said less about social class. Culture and class were both there, but not in the balance that characterizes this edition. My arguments have not substantially changed, but I think they are more effectively developed. In this edition, I also place greater emphasis on the connections between knowledge and power relations. I have always seen organic links between Black feminism as a social justice project and Black feminist thought as its intellectual center. Stated differently, the relationship between African-American women’s activism and Black feminist thought as an intellectual and political philosophy integral to that endeavor for me are inextricably linked.These links continue, but as social conditions change, these ties must be rethought. Rethinking empowerment also led me to incorporate new themes in this edition. For example, this volume says much more about nation as a form of oppression. Incorporating ideas about nation allowed me to introduce a transnational, global dimension. Whereas the discussion here of transnational politics and the global economy remains preliminary, I felt that it was important to include it. U.S. Black women must continue to struggle for our empowerment, but at the same time, we must recognize that U.S. Black feminism participates in a larger context of struggling for social justice that transcends U.S. borders. In particular, U.S. Black feminism should see commonalities that join women of African descent as well as differences that emerge from our diverse national histories.Whereas this edition remains centered on U.S. Black women, it raises questions concerning African-American women’s positionality within a global Black feminism. xii BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT Providing more complex analyses of these themes required trying to retain the main arguments of the first edition while changing their time-bounded expression. Just as political and intellectual contexts change, so does the language used to describe them. Some changes in terminology reflect benign shifts in usage. Others signal more deep-seated political issues. The cases that are most interesting occur when the same language continues to be used, whereas the meaning attached to it changes. This type of shift certainly affected the term Afrocentrism, a term that I used in the first edition. As understood in the 1970s and 1980s, Afrocentrism referred to African influences on African-American culture, consciousness, behavior, and social organization. Despite considerable diversity among thinkers who embraced this paradigm, Afrocentric analyses typically claimed that people of African descent have created and re-created a valuable system of ideas, social practices, and cultures that have been essential to Black survival. In the 1990s, however, news media and some segments of U.S. higher education attacked the term as well as all who used it. Effectively discrediting it, as of this writing, the term Afrocentrism refers to the ideas of a small group of Black Studies professionals with whom I have major areas of disagreeement, primarily concerning the treatment of gender and sexuality. For me, the main ideas of Afrocentrism, broadly defined, continue to have merit, but the term itself is too value laden to be useful. Readers familiar with the first edition may notice that I have retained the main ideas of a broadly defined Afrocentrism, but have substituted other terms. Providing more complex analyses while trying to retain the main arguments of the first edition led me to modify the overall organization of the volume. In order to strengthen my analyses, I moved blocks of text and even some chapters, all the while being careful to omit very little from the first edition. For example, because of the developments in the field of sexuality, I expanded the two chapters dealing with the sexual politics of Black womanhood and moved them earlier in the volume.This new placement allowed me to strengthen ideas about sexuality in the remainder of the volume. Similarly, I moved much of the material in the final chapter of the first edition into earlier chapters. In its place, here I present a new chapter on the politics of empowerment that provides a new capstone for the entire book. Readers familiar with the first edition will find that the three chapters in Part III have been most affected by this reorganization of text. These changes in Part III, however, enabled me to present a more theoretically rich analysis of the connections between knowledge and power than that provided in the first edition. Overall, the arguments from the first edition are here as well, but may appear in new and unexpected places. I have learned much from revising the first edition of Black Feminist Thought. In particular, the subjective experience of writing the first edition in the mid1980s and revising it now has been markedly different. I can remember how difficult it was for me to write the first edition.Then my concerns centered on coming to voice, especially carving out the intellectual and political space that would PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION xiii enable me to be heard. As the preface to the first edition points out, I saw my individual struggles as emblematic of Black women’s collective struggles to claim a similar intellectual and political space. The events surrounding the publication of the first edition certainly involved considerable struggle. One month before Black Feminist Thought was to be released, the entire staff that had worked on it was summarily fired, victims of a corporate takeover. We were all in shock. During its first year with its new publisher, the book received little promotion. Despite its media invisibility, Black Feminist Thought quickly exhausted its initial print run. I was despondent. I had worked so hard, and it all seemed to have been taken away so quickly. Fortunately, during that awful year before the book was sold yet again to its current publisher, Black Feminist Thought’s readers kept it alive. People shared copies, Xeroxed chapters, and engaged in effective word-ofmouth advertising.To this day, I remain deeply grateful to all of the readers of the first edition because without them, this book would have disappeared. I am in another place now. I remain less preoccupied with coming to voice because I know how quickly voice can be taken away. My concern now lies in finding effective ways to use the voice that I have claimed while I have it. Just as I confront new challenges, new challenges also face U.S. Black women and Black feminist thought as our self-defined knowledge. Because Black feminist thought is created under greatly changed conditions, I worry about its future. However, as long as Black feminist thought, or whatever terms we choose in the future to name this intellectual work, remains dedicated to fostering both Black women’s empowerment and broader social justice, I plan on using my voice to support it. I recognize that the struggle for justice is larger than any one group, individual, or social movement. It certainly transcends any one book, including my own. For me, social injustice is a collective problem that requires a collective solution. When it comes to my work, the only thing that is essential is that it contribute toward this end. Acknowledgments Writing this book was a collaborative effort, and I would like to thank those most essential to its completion. For the three years that it took me to write the first edition, my husband, Roger L. Collins, and daughter, Valerie L. Collins, lived with my uncertainty and struggles. During that time we all ate far too much fast food and certainly did not reside in a spotless house. But despite this book—or perhaps because of it—we are a stronger family. I also wish to thank those individuals who could not be with me while I produced this volume but whose contributions are reflected on every page. I drew much of my inspiration from the many Black women who have touched my life. They include my aunts, Mildred Walker, Marjorie Edwards, and Bertha Henry; teachers, friends, and othermothers who helped me along the way, Pauli Murray, Consuelo, Eloise “Muff” Smith, and Deborah Lewis; and countless Black women ancestors, both famous and anonymous, whose struggles created the foundation that nurtured me. I especially acknowledge the spirit of my mother, Eunice Randolph Hill. Often when I became discouraged, I thought of her and told myself that if she could persist despite the obstacles that she faced, then so could I. One great regret of my life is that my mother and my daughter will never meet. I hope these pages will bring them closer together. Many of my colleagues listened to partially articulated ideas, read earlier drafts of chapters, and generally offered the encouragement and intellectual stimulation that enabled me to remain critical my own work yet persevere. Special thanks to Margaret L. Andersen, Elsa Barkley Brown, Lynn Weber Cannon, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Sandra Harding, Deborah K. King, and Maxine Baca Zinn for their enthusiastic support. I am especially indebted to the Center for Research on Women at Memphis State Univerity for providing resources, ideas, and overall assistance.Also, I am deeply grateful to Elizabeth Higginbotham and Rosemarie Tong for reading this manuscript in its entirety and offering helpful suggestions. I have many people to thank for permission to reproduce copyright materals. Earlier versions of Chapters 2 and 10 appeared in Signs 14 (4), Summer 1989, pp. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv 745–73, and Social Problems 33 (6), Oct./Dec., 1986, pp. S14–S32. I also thank June Jordan and South End Press for On Call, 1985, and Marilyn Richardson and Indiana University Press for Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Women Political Writer, edited by Marilyn Richardson, 1987. This book takes materials from Drylongso, A Self-Portrait of Black America, by John Langston Gwaltney, copyright 1980 by John Langston Gwaltney, reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.; “Strange Fruit,” by Lewis Allan, copyright 1939, Edward B. Marks Music Company, copyright renewed, used by permission, all rights reserved; and “Respect,” lyrics and music by Otis Redding, copyright 1965 and 1967 by Irving Music, Inc. (BMI), international copyright secured, all rights reserved. One special person participated in virtually every phase of the first edition of this project. As a research assistant, she prepared literature reviews, read and commented on chapter drafts, and skillfully located even the most obscure materials. Her contributions often surpassed the scholarly—she provided child care so I could work and even fed my family’s cats. During our many long conversations, she patiently listened to my ideas, bravely shared parts of her life that profoundly influenced my thinking, and in many unspoken ways told me on a daily basis how important it was that I keep going. Special thanks therefore go out to Patrice L. Dickerson, an emerging Black feminist intellectual, a future colleague, and always a solid sister-friend. For the institutional support that I needed to work on this second edition, I thank Joseph Caruso, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Cincinnati, John Brackett, Head of the Department of African-American Studies, and Robin Sheets, Director of the Women’s Studies Program.The Charles Phelps Taft fund at the University of Cincinnati also made an important contribution to this project. The research budget that accompanied my being named Charles Phelps Taft Professor of Sociology funded part of the expenses incurred in final manuscript preparation. My students at the University of Cincinnati were also important in helping me complete this project. The undergraduate majors in the Department of AfricanAmerican Studies proved to be invaluable in helping me clarify arguments concerning power that became important in the second edition. I also thank the graduate students in Women’s Studies who enrolled in my graduate seminars “Black Feminism: Issues and Challenges” and “Black Women and the Politics of Sexuality.”The students in these courses greatly enriched my understanding of issues of global feminism and of the significance of sexuality. Special thanks goes out to Amber Green, my research assistant for the year. We were both under considerable stress, but we both made it through the year. The staff at Routledge has been wonderful. Heidi Freund, my editor at Routledge, who politely yet persistently kept asking me to do this revision until I finally agreed to do it, deserves special credit. Also, I thank Shea Settimi, Anthony Mancini, and other members of the staff at Routledge for making the production process so positive for me. I also thank Norma McLemore for meticulous copyediting of the manuscript. As any writer knows, a good copyeditor is important. Finally, I remain grateful for the numerous invitations that I have received over xvi BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT the years to lecture on college campuses and at professional meetings. These trips enabled me to work through the ideas in the second edition with diverse audiences. Whereas the list of colleagues and new friends that I met during these visits is too long to list, I appreciate all of the ideas that people shared with me. I especially thank the students, parents, poets, high school teachers, activists, and ministers whom I met on my trips.The conversations that I was able to have with you proved to be invaluable. I thank you all, and hope that you each see a bit of yourselves in these pages. Part 1: The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought 1 1 THE POLITICS OF BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT I n 1831 Maria W. Stewart asked,“How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?” Orphaned at age five, bound out to a clergyman’s family as a domestic servant, Stewart struggled to gather isolated fragments of an education when and where she could. As the first American woman to lecture in public on political issues and to leave copies of her texts, this early U.S. Black woman intellectual foreshadowed a variety of themes taken up by her Black feminist successors (Richardson 1987). Maria Stewart challenged African-American women to reject the negative images of Black womanhood so prominent in her times, pointing out that race, gender, and class oppression were the fundamental causes of Black women’s poverty. In an 1833 speech she proclaimed, “Like King Solomon, who put neither nail nor hammer to the temple, yet received the praise; so also have the white Americans gained themselves a name . . . while in reality we have been their principal foundation and support.” Stewart objected to the injustice of this situation: “We have pursued the shadow, they have obtained the substance; we have performed the labor, they have received the profits; we have planted the vines, they have eaten the fruits of them” (Richardson 1987, 59). Maria Stewart was not content to point out the source of Black women’s oppression. She urged Black women to forge self-definitions of self-reliance and independence. “It is useless for us any longer to sit with our hands folded, reproaching the whites; for that will never elevate us,” she exhorted. “Possess the spirit of independence. . . . Possess the spirit of men, bold and enterprising, fearless and undaunted” (p. 53). To Stewart, the power of self-definition was essential, for Black women’s survival was at stake. “Sue for your rights and privileges. Know the reason you cannot attain them. Weary them with your importunities.You can but die if you make the attempt; and we shall certainly die if you do not” (p. 38). 2 BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT Stewart also challenged Black women to use their special roles as mothers to forge powerful mechanisms of political action. “O, ye mothers, what a responsibility rests on you!” Stewart preached. “You have souls committed to your charge. . . . It is you that must create in the minds of your little girls and boys a thirst for knowledge, the love of virtue, . . . and the cultivation of a pure heart.” Stewart recognized the magnitude of the task at hand. “Do not say you cannot make any thing of your children; but say . . . we will try” (p. 35). Maria Stewart was one of the first U.S. Black feminists to champion the utility of Black women’s relationships with one another in providing a community for Black women’s activism and self-determination. “Shall it any longer be said of the daughters of Africa, they have no ambition, they have no force?” she questioned. “By no means. Let every female heart become united, and let us raise a fund ourselves; and at the end of one year and a half, we might be able to lay the corner stone for the building of a High School, that the higher branches of knowledge might be enjoyed by us” (p. 37). Stewart saw the potential for Black women’s activism as educators. She advised, “Turn your attention to knowledge and improvement; for knowledge is power” (p. 41). Though she said little in her speeches about the sexual politics of her time, her advice to African-American women suggests that she was painfully aware of the sexual abuse visited upon Black women. She continued to “plead the cause of virtue and the pure principles of morality” (p. 31) for Black women.And to those Whites who thought that Black women were inherently inferior, Stewart offered a biting response: “Our souls are fired with the same love of liberty and independence with which your souls are fired. . . . [T]oo much of your blood flows in our veins, too much of your color in our skins, for us not to possess your spirits” (p. 40). Despite Maria Stewart’s intellectual prowess, the ideas of this extraordinary woman come to us only in scattered fragments that not only suggest her brilliance but speak tellingly of the fate of countless Black women intellectuals. Many Maria Stewarts exist, African-American women whose minds and talents have been suppressed by the pots and kettles symbolic of Black women’s subordination (Guy-Sheftall 1986).1 Far too many African-American women intellectuals have labored in isolation and obscurity and, like Zora Neale Hurston, lie buried in unmarked graves. Some have been more fortunate, for they have become known to us, largely through the efforts of contemporary Black women scholars (Hine et al. 1993; Guy-Sheftall 1995b). Like Alice Walker, these scholars sense that “a people do not throw their geniuses away” and that “if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists, scholars, and witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, . . . if necessary, bone by bone” (Walker 1983, 92). This painstaking process of collecting the ideas and actions of “thrown away” Black women like Maria Stewart has revealed one important discovery. Black women intellectuals have laid a vital analytical foundation for a distinctive THE POLITICS OF BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT 3 standpoint on self, community, and society and, in doing so, created a multifaceted, African-American women’s intellectual tradition.While clear discontinuities in this tradition exist—times when Black women’s voices were strong, and others when assuming a more muted tone was essential—one striking dimension of the ideas of Maria W. Stewart and her successors is the thematic consistency of their work. If such a rich intellectual tradition exists, why has it remained virtually invisible until now. In 1905 Fannie Barrier Williams lamented, “The colored girl . . . is not known and hence not believed in; she belongs to a race that is best designated by the term ‘problem,’ and she lives beneath the shadow of that problem which envelops and obscures her” (Williams 1987, 150). Why are AfricanAmerican women and our ideas not known and not believed in? The shadow obscuring this complex Black women’s intellectual tradition is neither accidental nor benign. Suppressing the knowledge produced by any oppressed group makes it easier for dominant groups to rule because the seeming absence of dissent suggests that subordinate groups willingly collaborate in their own victimization (Scott 1985). Maintaining the invisibility of Black women and our ideas not only in the United States, but in Africa, the Caribbean, South America, Europe, and other places where Black women now live, has been critical in maintaining social inequalities. Black women engaged in reclaiming and constructing Black women’s knowledges often point to the politics of suppression that affect their projects. For example, several authors in Heidi Mirza’s (1997) edited volume on Black British feminism identify their invisibility and silencing in the contemporary United Kingdom. Similarly, South African businesswoman Danisa Baloyi describes her astonishment at the invisibility of African women in U.S. scholarship: “As a student doing research in the United States, I was amazed by the [small] amount of information on Black South African women, and shocked that only a minuscule amount was actually written by Black women themselves” (Baloyi 1995, 41). Despite this suppression, U.S. Black women have managed to do intellectual work, and to have our ideas matter. Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune, Toni Morrison, Barbara Smith, and countless others have consistently struggled to make themselves heard. African women writers such as Ama Ata Aidoo, Buchi Emecheta, and Ellen Kuzwayo have used their voices to raise important issues that affect Black African women (James 1990). Like the work of Maria W. Stewart and that of Black women transnationally, African-American women’s intellectual work has aimed to foster Black women’s activism. This dialectic of oppression and activism, the tension between the suppression of African-American women’s ideas and our intellectual activism in the face of that suppression, constitutes the politics of U.S. Black feminist thought. More important, understanding this dialectical relationship is critical in assessing how U.S. Black feminist thought—its core themes, epistemological significance, and 4 BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT connections to domestic and transnational Black feminist practice—is fundamentally embedded in a political context that has challenged its very right to exist. The Suppression of Black Feminist Thought The vast majority of African-American women were brought to the United States to work as slaves in a situation of oppression. Oppression describes any unjust situation where, systematically and over a long period of time, one group denies another group access to the resources of society. Race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, and ethnicity among others constitute major forms of oppression in the United States. However, the convergence of race, class, and gender oppression characteristic of U.S. slavery shaped all subsequent relationships that women of African descent had within Black American families and communities, with employers, and among one another. It also created the political context for Black women’s intellectual work. African-American women’s oppression has encompassed three interdependent dimensions. First, the exploitation of Black women’s labor essential to U.S. capitalism—the “iron pots and kettles” symbolizing Black women’s long-standing ghettoization in service occupations—represents the economic dimension of oppression (Davis 1981; Marable 1983; Jones 1985; Amott and Matthaei 1991). Survival for most African-American women has been such an all-consuming activity that most have had few opportunities to do intellectual work as it has been traditionally defined. The drudgery of enslaved African-American women’s work and the grinding poverty of “free” wage labor in the rural South tellingly illustrate the high costs Black women have paid for survival. The millions of impoverished African-American women ghettoized in Philadelphia, Birmingham, Oakland, Detroit, and other U.S. inner cities demonstrate the continuation of these earlier forms of Black women’s economic exploitation (Brewer 1993; Omolade 1994). Second, the political dimension of oppression has denied African-American women the rights and privileges routinely extended to White male citizens (Burnham 1987; Scales-Trent 1989; Berry 1994). Forbidding Black women to vote, excluding African-Americans and women from public office, and withholding equitable treatment in the criminal justice system all substantiate the political subordination of Black women. Educational institutions have also fostered this pattern of disenfranchisement. Past practices such as denying literacy to slaves and relegating Black women to underfunded, segregated Southern schools worked to ensure that a quality education for Black women remained the exception rather than the rule (Mullings 1997). The large numbers of young Black women in inner cities and impoverished rural areas who continue to leave school before attaining full literacy represent the continued efficacy of the political dimension of Black women’s oppression. THE POLITICS OF BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT 5 Finally, controlling images applied to Black women that originated during the slave era attest to the ideological dimension of U.S. Black women’s oppression (King 1973; D. White 1985; Carby 1987; Morton 1991). Ideology refers to the body of ideas reflecting the interests of a group of people. Within U.S. culture, racist and sexist ideologies permeate the social structure to such a degree that they become hegemonic, namely, seen as natural, normal, and inevitable. In this context, certain assumed qualities that are attached to Black women are used to justify oppression. From the mammies, jezebels, and breeder women of slavery to the smiling Aunt Jemimas on pancake mix boxes, ubiquitous Black prostitutes, and ever-present welfare mothers of contemporary popular culture, negative stereotypes applied to African-American women have been fundamental to Black women’s oppression. Taken together, the supposedly seamless web of economy, polity, and ideology function as a highly effective system of social control designed to keep African-American women in an assigned, subordinate place.This larger system of oppression works to suppress the ideas of Black women intellectuals and to protect elite White male interests and worldviews. Denying African-American women the credentials to become literate certainly excluded most AfricanAmerican women from positions as scholars, teachers, authors, poets, and critics. Moreover, while Black women historians, writers, and social scientists have long existed, until recently these women have not held leadership positions in universities, professional associations, publishing concerns, broadcast media, and other social institutions of knowledge validation. Black women’s exclusion from positions of power within mainstream institutions has led to the elevation of elite White male ideas and interests and the corresponding suppression of Black women’s ideas and interests in traditional scholarship (Higginbotham 1989; Morton 1991; Collins 1998a, 95–123). Moreover, this historical exclusion means that stereotypical images of Black women permeate popular culture and public policy (Wallace 1990; Lubiano 1992; Jewell 1993). U.S. and European women’s studies have challenged the seemingly hegemonic ideas of elite White men. Ironically, Western feminisms have also suppressed Black women’s ideas (duCille 1996, 81–119). Even though Black women intellectuals have long expressed a distinctive African-influenced and feminist sensibility about how race and class intersect in structuring gender, historically we have not been full participants in White feminist organizations (Giddings 1984; Zinn et al. 1986; Caraway 1991). As a result, African-American, Latino, Native American, and Asian-American women have criticized Western feminisms for being racist and overly concerned with White, middle-class women’s issues (Moraga and Anzaldua 1981; Smith 1982a; Dill 1983; Davis 1989). Traditionally, many U.S. White feminist scholars have resisted having Black women as full colleagues. Moreover, this historical suppression of Black women’s ideas has had a pronounced influence on feminist theory. One pattern of suppression is that of omission.Theories advanced as being universally applicable to 6 BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT women as a group upon closer examination appear greatly limited by the White, middle-class, and Western origins of their proponents. For example, Nancy Chodorow’s (1978) work on sex role socialization and Carol Gilligan’s (1982) study of the moral development of women both rely heavily on White, middleclass samples. While these two classics made key contributions to feminist theory, they simultaneously promoted the notion of a generic woman who is White and middle class. The absence of Black feminist ideas from these and other studies placed them in a much more tenuous position to challenge the hegemony of mainstream scholarship on behalf of all women. Another pattern of suppression lies in paying lip service to the need for diversity, but changing little about one’s own practice. Currently, some U.S.White women who possess great competence in researching a range of issues acknowledge the need for diversity, yet omit women of color from their work. These women claim that they are unqualified to understand or even speak of “Black women’s experiences” because they themselves are not Black. Others include a few safe, “hand-picked” Black women’s voices to avoid criticisms that they are racist. Both examples reflect a basic unwillingness by many U.S. White feminists to alter the paradigms that guide their work. A more recent pattern of suppression involves incorporating, changing, and thereby depoliticizing Black feminist ideas. The growing popularity of postmodernism in U.S. higher education in the 1990s, especially within literary criticism and cultural studies, fosters a climate where symbolic inclusion often substitutes for bona fide substantive changes. Because interest in Black women’s work has reached occult status, suggests Ann duCille (1996), it “increasingly marginalizes both the black women critics and scholars who excavated the fields in question and their black feminist ‘daughters’ who would further develop those fields” (p. 87). Black feminist critic Barbara Christian (1994), a pioneer in creating Black women’s studies in the U.S. academy, queries whether Black feminism can survive the pernicious politics of resegregation. In discussing the politics of a new multiculturalism, Black feminist critic Hazel Carby (1992) expresses dismay at the growing situation of symbolic inclusion, in which the texts of Black women writers are welcome in the multicultural classroom while actual Black women are not. Not all White Western feminists participate in these diverse patterns of suppression. Some do try to build coalitions across racial and other markers of difference, often with noteworthy results. Works by Elizabeth Spelman (1988), Sandra Harding (1986, 1998), Margaret Andersen (1991), Peggy McIntosh (1988), Mab Segrest (1994), Anne Fausto-Sterling (1995), and other individual U.S. White feminist thinkers reflect sincere efforts to develop a multiracial, diverse feminism. However, despite their efforts, these concerns linger on. Like feminist scholarship, the diverse strands of African-American social and political thought have also challenged mainstream scholarship. However, Black social and political thought has been limited by both the reformist postures THE POLITICS OF BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT 7 toward change assumed by many U.S. Black intellectuals (Cruse 1967; West 1977–78) and the secondary status afforded the ideas and experiences of AfricanAmerican women. Adhering to a male-defined ethos that far too often equates racial progress with the acquisition of an ill-defined manhood has left much U.S. Black thought with a prominent masculinist bias. In this case the patterns of suppressing Black women’s ideas have been similar yet different. Though Black women have played little or no part in dominant academic discourse and White feminist arenas, we have long been included in the organizational structures of Black civil society. U.S. Black women’s acceptance of subordinate roles in Black organizations does not mean that we wield little authority or that we experience patriarchy in the same way as do White women in White organizations (Evans 1979; Gilkes 1985). But with the exception of Black women’s organizations, male-run organizations have historically either not stressed Black women’s issues (Beale 1970; Marable 1983), or have done so under duress. For example, Black feminist activist Pauli Murray (1970) found that from its founding in 1916 to 1970, the Journal of Negro History published only five articles devoted exclusively to Black women. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s (1993) historical monograph on Black women in Black Baptist churches records African-American women’s struggles to raise issues that concerned women. Even progressive Black organizations have not been immune from gender discrimination. Civil rights activist Ella Baker’s experiences in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference illustrate one form that suppressing Black women’s ideas and talents can take. Ms. Baker virtually ran the entire organization, yet had to defer to the decision-making authority of the exclusively male leadership group (Cantarow 1980). Civil rights activist Septima Clark describes similar experiences: “I found all over the South that whatever the man said had to be right. They had the whole say. The woman couldn’t say a thing” (C. Brown 1986, 79). Radical African-American women also can find themselves deferring to male authority. In her autobiography, Elaine Brown (1992), a participant and subsequent leader of the 1960s radical organization the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, discusses the sexism expressed by Panther men. Overall, even though Black women intellectuals have asserted their right to speak both as African-Americans and as women, historically these women have not held top leadership positions in Black organizations and have frequently struggled within them to express Black feminist ideas (Giddings 1984). Much contemporary U.S. Black feminist thought reflects Black women’s increasing willingness to oppose gender inequality within Black civil society. Septima Clark describes this transformation: I used to feel that women couldn’t speak up, because when district meetings were being held at my home . . . I didn’t feel as if I could tell them what I had in mind . . . But later on, I found out that women had a lot to say, and what they had to say was really worthwhile. . . . So we started talking, and have been talking quite a bit since that time. (C. Brown 1986, 82) 8 BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT African-American women intellectuals have been “talking quite a bit” since 1970 and have insisted that the masculinist bias in Black social and political thought, the racist bias in feminist theory, and the heterosexist bias in both be corrected (see, e.g., Bambara 1970; Dill 1979; Jordan 1981; Combahee River Collective 1982; Lorde 1984). Within Black civil society, the increasing visibility of Black women’s ideas did not go unopposed. The virulent reaction to earlier Black women’s writings by some Black men, such as Robert Staples’s (1979) analysis of Ntozake Shange’s (1975) choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, and Michele Wallace’s (1978) controversial volume, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, illustrates the difficulty of challenging the masculinist bias in Black social and political thought. Alice Walker encountered similarly hostile reactions to her publication of The Color Purple. In describing the response of AfricanAmerican men to the outpouring of publications by Black women writers in the 1970s and 1980s, Calvin Hernton offers an incisive criticism of the seeming tenacity of a masculinist bias: The telling thing about the hostile attitude of black men toward black women writers is that they interpret the new thrust of the women as being “counter-productive” to the historical goal of the Black struggle. Revealingly, while black men have achieved outstanding recognition throughout the history of black writing, black women have not accused the men of collaborating with the enemy and setting back the progress of the race. (1985, 5) Not all Black male reaction during this period was hostile. For example, Manning Marable (1983) devotes an entire chapter in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America to how sexism has been a primary deterrent to Black community development. Following Marable’s lead, work by Haki Madhubuti (1990), Cornel West (1993), Michael Awkward (1996), Michael Dyson (1996), and others suggests that some U.S. Black male thinkers have taken Black feminist thought seriously. Despite the diverse ideological perspectives expressed by these writers, each seemingly recognizes the importance of Black women’s ideas. Black Feminist Thought as Critical Social Theory Even if they appear to be otherwise, situations such as the suppression of Black women’s ideas within traditional scholarship and the struggles within the critiques of that established knowledge are inherently unstable. Conditions in the wider political economy simultaneously shape Black women’s subordination and foster activism. On some level, people who are oppressed usually know it. For African-American women, the knowledge gained at intersecting oppressions of race, class, and gender provides the stimulus for crafting and passing THE POLITICS OF BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT 9 on the subjugated knowledge2 of Black women’s critical social theory (Collins 1998a, 3–10). As an historically oppressed group, U.S. Black women have produced social thought designed to oppose oppression. Not only does the form assumed by this thought diverge from standard academic theory—it can take the form of poetry, music, essays, and the like—but the purpose of Black women’s collective thought is distinctly different. Social theories emerging from and/or on behalf of U.S. Black women and other historically oppressed groups aim to find ways to escape from, survive in, and/or oppose prevailing social and economic injustice. In the United States, for example, African-American social and political thought analyzes institutionalized racism, not to help it work more efficiently, but to resist it. Feminism advocates women’s emancipation and empowerment, Marxist social thought aims for a more equitable society, while queer theory opposes heterosexism. Beyond U.S. borders, many women from oppressed groups also struggle to understand new forms of injustice. In a transnational, postcolonial context, women within new and often Black-run nation-states in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia struggle with new meanings attached to ethnicity, citizenship status, and religion. In increasingly multicultural European nation-states, women migrants from former colonies encounter new forms of subjugation (Yuval-Davis 1997). Social theories expressed by women emerging from these diverse groups typically do not arise from the rarefied atmosphere of their imaginations. Instead, social theories reflect women’s efforts to come to terms with lived experiences within intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and religion (see, e.g., Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Mirza 1997). Black feminist thought, U.S. Black women’s critical social theory, reflects similar power relationships. For African-American women, critical social theory encompasses bodies of knowledge and sets of institutional practices that actively grapple with the central questions facing U.S. Black women as a collectivity. The need for such thought arises because African-American women as a group remain oppressed within a U.S. context characterized by injustice. This neither means that all African-American women within that group are oppressed in the same way, nor that some U.S. Black women do not suppress others. Black feminist thought’s identity as a “critical” social theory lies in its commitment to justice, both for U.S. Black women as a collectivity and for that of other similarly oppressed groups. Historically, two factors stimulated U.S. Black women’s critical social theory. For one, prior to World War II, racial segregation in urban housing became so entrenched that the majority of African-American women lived in self-contained Black neighborhoods where their children attended overwhelmingly Black schools, and where they themselves belonged to all-Black churches and similar community organizations. Despite the fact that ghettoization was designed to foster the political control and economic exploitation of Black Americans (Squires 1994), these all-Black neighborhoods simultaneously provided a sepa- 10 BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT rate space where African-American women and men could use African-derived ideas to craft distinctive oppositional knowledges designed to resist racial oppression. Every social group has a constantly evolving worldview that it uses to order and evaluate its own experiences (Sobel 1979). For African-Americans this worldview originated in the cosmologies of diverse West African ethnic groups (Diop 1974). By retaining and reworking significant elements of these West African cultures, communities of enslaved Africans offered their members explanations for slavery alternative to those advanced by slave owners (Gutman 1976; Webber 1978; Sobel 1979). These African-derived ideas also laid the foundation for the rules of a distinctive Black American civil society. Later on, confining African-Americans to all-Black areas in the rural South and Northern urban ghettos fostered the solidification of a distinctive ethos in Black civil society regarding language (Smitherman 1977), religion (Sobel 1979; Paris 1995), family structure (Sudarkasa 1981b), and community politics (Brown 1994). While essential to the survival of U.S. Blacks as a group and expressed differently by individual African-Americans, these knowledges remained simultaneously hidden from and suppressed by Whites. Black oppositional knowledges existed to resist injustice, but they also remained subjugated. As mothers, othermothers, teachers, and churchwomen in essentially allBlack rural communities and urban neighborhoods, U.S. Black women participated in constructing and reconstructing these oppositional knowledges. Through the lived experiences gained within their extended families and communities, individual African-American women fashioned their own ideas about the meaning of Black womanhood. When these ideas found collective expression, Black women’s self-definitions enabled them to refashion African-influenced conceptions of self and community. These self-definitions of Black womanhood were designed to resist the negative controlling images of Black womanhood advanced by Whites as well as the discriminatory social practices that these controlling images supported. In all, Black women’s participation in crafting a constantly changing African-American culture fostered distinctively Black and womencentered worldviews. Another factor that stimulated U.S. Black women’s critical social theory lay in the common experiences they gained from their jobs. Prior to World War II, U.S. Black women worked primarily in two occupations—agriculture and domestic work. Their ghettoization in domestic work sparked an important contradiction. Domestic work fostered U.S. Black women’s economic exploitation, yet it simultaneously created the conditions for distinctively Black and female forms of resistance. Domestic work allowed African-American women to see White elites, both actual and aspiring, from perspectives largely obscured from Black men and from these groups themselves. In their White “families,” Black women not only performed domestic duties but frequently formed strong ties with the children they nurtured, and with the employers themselves. On one level this insider relation- THE POLITICS OF BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT 11 ship was satisfying to all concerned. Accounts of Black domestic workers stress the sense of self-affirmation the women experienced at seeing racist ideology demystified. But on another level these Black women knew that they could never belong to their White “families.” They were economically exploited workers and thus would remain outsiders. The result was being placed in a curious outsiderwithin social location (Collins 1986b), a peculiar marginality that stimulated a distinctive Black women’s perspective on a variety of themes (see, e.g., Childress 1986). Taken together, Black women’s participation in constructing AfricanAmerican culture in all-Black settings and the distinctive perspectives gained from their outsider-within placement in domestic work provide the material backdrop for a unique Black women’s standpoint. When armed with cultural beliefs honed in Black civil society, many Black women who found themselves doing domestic work often developed distinct views of the contradictions between the dominant group’s actions and ideologies. Moreover, they often shared their ideas with other African-American women. Nancy White, a Black inner-city resident, explores the connection between experience and beliefs: Now, I understand all these things from living. But you can’t lay up on these flowery beds of ease and think that you are running your life, too. Some women, white women, can run their husband’s lives for a while, but most of them have to . . . see what he tells them there is to see. If he tells them that they ain’t seeing what they know they are seeing, then they have to just go on like it wasn’t there! (in Gwaltney 1980, 148) Not only does this passage speak to the power of the dominant group to suppress the knowledge produced by subordinate groups, but it illustrates how being in outsider-within locations can foster new angles of vision on oppression. Ms. White’s Blackness makes her a perpetual outsider. She could never be a White middle-class woman lying on a “flowery bed of ease.” But her work of caring for White women allowed her an insider’s view of some of the contradictions between White women thinking that they are running their lives and the patriarchal power and authority in their households. Practices such as these, whether experienced oneself or learned by listening to African-American women who have had them, have encouraged many U.S. Black women to question the contradictions between dominant ideologies of American womanhood and U.S. Black women’s devalued status. If women are allegedly passive and fragile, then why are Black women treated as “mules” and assigned heavy cleaning chores? If good mothers are supposed to stay at home with their children, then why are U.S. Black women on public assistance forced to find jobs and leave their children in day care? If women’s highest calling is to become mothers, then why are Black teen mothers pressured to use Norplant and Depo Provera? In the absence of a viable Black feminism that investigates how intersecting oppressions of race, gender, and class foster these contradictions, 12 BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT the angle of vision created by being deemed devalued workers and failed mothers could easily be turned inward, leading to internalized oppression. But the legacy of struggle among U.S. Black women suggests that a collectively shared, Black women’s oppositional knowledge has long existed. This collective wisdom in turn has spurred U.S. Black women to generate a more specialized knowledge, namely, Black feminist thought as critical social theory. Just as fighting injustice lay at the heart of U.S. Black women’s experiences, so did analyzing and creating imaginative responses to injustice characterize the core of Black feminist thought. Historically, while they often disagreed on its expression—some U.S. Black women were profoundly reformist while more radical thinkers bordered on the revolutionary—African-American women intellectuals who were nurtured in social conditions of racial segregation strove to develop Black feminist thought as critical social theory. Regardless of social class and other differences among U.S. Black women, all were in some way affected by intersecting oppressions of race, gender, and class. The economic, political, and ideological dimensions of U.S. Black women’s oppression suppressed the intellectual production of individual Black feminist thinkers. At the same time, these same social conditions simultaneously stimulated distinctive patterns of U.S. Black women’s activism that also influenced and was influenced by individual Black women thinkers. Thus, the dialectic of oppression and activism characterizing U.S. Black women’s experiences with intersecting oppressions also influenced the ideas and actions of Black women intellectuals. The exclusion of Black women’s ideas from mainstream academic discourse and the curious placement of African-American women intellectuals in feminist thinking, Black social and political theories, and in other important thought such as U.S. labor studies has meant that U.S. Black women intellectuals have found themselves in outsider-within positions in many academic endeavors (Hull et al. 1982; Christian 1989). The assumptions on which full group membership are based—Whiteness for feminist thought, maleness for Black social and political thought, and the combination for mainstream scholarship—all negate Black women’s realities. Prevented from becoming full insiders in any of these areas of inquiry, Black women remained in outsider-within locations, individuals whose marginality provided a distinctive angle of vision on these intellectual and political entities. Alice Walker’s work exemplifies these fundamental influences within Black women’s intellectual traditions. Walker describes how her outsider-within location influenced her thinking: “I believe . . . that it was from this period—from my solitary, lonely position, the position of an outcast—that I began really to see people and things, really to notice relationships” (Walker 1983, 244). Walker realizes that “the gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account” (p. 264). And yet marginality is not the only influence on her work. By reclaiming the THE POLITICS OF BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT 13 works of Zora Neale Hurston and in other ways placing Black women’s experiences and culture at the center of her work, she draws on alternative Black feminist worldviews. Developing Black Feminist Thought Starting from the assumption that African-American women have created independent, oppositional yet subjugated knowledges concerning our own subordination, contemporary U.S. Black women intellectuals are engaged in the struggle to reconceptualize all dimensions of the dialectic of oppression and activism as it applies to African-American women. Central to this enterprise is reclaiming Black feminist intellectual traditions (see, e.g., Harley and Terborg-Penn 1978; Hull et al. 1982; James and Busia 1993; and Guy-Sheftall 1995a, 1995b). For many U.S. Black women intellectuals, this task of reclaiming Black women’s subjugated knowledge takes on special meaning. Knowing that the minds and talents of our grandmothers, mothers, and sisters have been suppressed stimulates many contributions to the growing field of Black women’s studies (Hull et al. 1982). Alice Walker describes how this sense of purpose affects her work: “In my own work I write not only what I want to read—understanding fully and indelibly that if I don’t do it no one else is so vitally interested, or capable of doing it to my satisfaction—I write all the things I should have been able to read ” (Walker 1983, 13). Reclaiming Black women’s ideas involves discovering, reinterpreting, and, in many cases, analyzing for the first time the works of individual U.S. Black women thinkers who were so extraordinary that they did manage to have their ideas preserved. In some cases this process involves locating unrecognized and unheralded works, scattered and long out of print. Marilyn Richardson’s (1987) painstaking editing of the writings and speeches of Maria Stewart, and Mary Helen Washington’s (1975, 1980, 1987) collections of Black women’s writings typify this process. Similarly, Alice Walker’s (1979a) efforts to have Zora Neale Hurston’s unmarked grave recognized parallel her intellectual quest to honor Hurston’s important contributions to Black feminist literary traditions. Reclaiming Black women’s ideas also involves discovering, reinterpreting, and analyzing the ideas of subgroups within the larger collectivity of U.S. Black women who have been silenced. For example, burgeoning scholarship by and about Black lesbians reveals a diverse and complex history. Gloria Hull’s (1984) careful compilation of the journals of Black feminist intellectual Alice DunbarNelson illustrates the difficulties of being closeted yet still making major contributions to African-American social and political thought. Audre Lorde’s (1982) autobiography, Zami, provides a book-length treatment of Black lesbian communities in New York. Similarly, Kennedy and Davis’s (1994) history of the for- 14 BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT mation of lesbian communities in 1940s and 1950s Buffalo, New York, strives to understand how racial segregation influenced constructions of lesbian identities. Reinterpreting existing works through new theoretical frameworks is another dimension of developing Black feminist thought. In Black feminist literary criticism, this process is exemplified by Barbara Christian’s (1985) landmark volume on Black women writers, Mary Helen Washington’s (1987) reassessment of anger and voice in Maud Martha, a much-neglected work by novelist and poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and Hazel Carby’s (1987) use of the lens of race, class, and gender to reinterpret the works of nineteenth-century Black women novelists. Within Black feminist historiography the tremendous strides that have been made in U.S. Black women’s history are evident in Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s (1989) analysis of the emerging concepts and paradigms in Black women’s history, her study of women in the Black Baptist Church (1993), Stephanie Shaw’s (1996) study of Black professional women workers during the Jim Crow era, and the landmark volume Black Women in the United States: An Historical Encyclopedia (Hine et al. 1993). Developing Black feminist thought also involves searching for its expression in alternative institutional locations and among women who are not commonly perceived as intellectuals. As defined in this volume, Black women intellectuals are neither all academics nor found primarily in the Black middle class. Instead, all U.S. Black women who somehow contribute to Black feminist thought as critical social theory are deemed to be “intellectuals.” They may be highly educated. Many are not. For example, nineteenth-century Black feminist activist Sojourner Truth is not typically seen as an intellectual.3 Because she could neither read nor write, much of what we know about her has been recorded by other people. One of her most famous speeches, that delivered at the 1851 women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, comes to us in a report written by a feminist abolitionist some time after the event itself (Painter 1993). We do not know what Truth actually said, only what the recorder claims that she said. Despite this limitation, in that speech Truth reportedly provides an incisive analysis of the definition of the term woman forwarded in the mid-1800s: That man over there says women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman? (Loewenberg and Bogin 1976, 235) By using the contradictions between her life as an African-American woman and the qualities ascribed to women, Sojourner Truth exposes the concept of THE POLITICS OF BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT 15 woman as being culturally constructed. Her life as a second-class citizen has been filled with hard physical labor, with no assistance from men. Her question, “and ain’t I a woman?” points to the contradictions inherent in blanket use of the term woman. For those who question Truth’s femininity, she invokes her status as a mother of thirteen children, all sold off into slavery, and asks again, “and ain’t I a woman?” Rather than accepting the existing assumptions about what a woman is and then trying to prove that she fit the standards, Truth challenged the very standards themselves. Her actions demonstrate the process of deconstruction— namely, exposing a concept as ideological or culturally constructed rather than as natural or a simple reflection of reality (Collins 1998a, 137–45). By deconstructing the concept woman, Truth proved herself to be a formidable intellectual. And yet Truth was a former slave who never learned to read or write. Examining the contributions of women like Sojourner Truth suggests that the concept of intellectual must itself be deconstructed. Not all Black women intellectuals are educated. Not all Black women intellectuals work in academia. Furthermore, not all highly educated Black women, especially those who are employed in U.S. colleges and universities, are automatically intellectuals. U.S. Black women intellectuals are not a female segment of William E. B. DuBois’s notion of the “talented tenth.” One is neither born an intellectual nor does one become one by earning a degree. Rather, doing intellectual work of the sort envisioned within Black feminism requires a process of self-conscious struggle on behalf of Black women, regardless of the actual social location where that work occurs. These are not idle concerns within new power relations that have greatly altered the fabric of U.S. and Black civil society. Race, class, and gender still constitute intersecting oppressions, but the ways in which they are now organized to produce social injustice differ from prior eras. Just as theories, epistemologies, and facts produced by any group of individuals represent the standpoints and interests of their creators, the very definition of who is legitimated to do intellectual work is not only politically contested, but is changing (Mannheim 1936; Gramsci 1971). Reclaiming Black feminist intellectual traditions involves much more than developing Black feminist analyses using standard epistemological criteria. It also involves challenging the very terms of intellectual discourse itself. Assuming new angles of vision on which U.S. Black women are, in fact, intellectuals, and on their seeming dedication to contributing to Black feminist thought raises new questions about the production of this oppositional knowledge. Historically, much of the Black women’s intellectual tradition occurred in institutional locations other than the academy. For example, the music of working-class Black women blues singers of the 1920 and 1930s is often seen as one important site outside academia for this intellectual tradition (Davis 1998). Whereas Ann duCille (1993) quite rightly warns us about viewing Black women’s blues through rose-colored glasses, the fact remains that far more Black women listened to Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey than were able to read Nella 16 BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT Larsen or Jessie Fauset. Despite impressive educational achievements that have allowed many U.S. Black women to procure jobs in higher education and the media, this may continue to be the case. For example, Imani Perry (1995) suggests that the music of Black women hip-hop artists serves as a new site of Black women’s intellectual production. Again, despite the fact that hip-hop contains diverse and contradictory components (Rose 1994) and that popularity alone is insufficient to confer the title “intellectual,” many more Black women listen to Queen Latifah and Salt ‘N’ Pepa than read literature by Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Because clarifying Black women’s experiences and ideas lies at the core of Black feminist thought, interpreting them requires collaborative leadership among those who participate in the diverse forms that Black women’s communities now take. This requires acknowledging not only how African-American women outside of academia have long functioned as intellectuals by representing the interests of Black women as a group, but how this continues to be the case. For example, rap singer Sister Souljah’s music as well as her autobiography No Disrespect (1994) certainly can be seen as contributing to Black feminist thought as critical social theory. Despite her uncritical acceptance of a masculinist Black nationalist ideology, Souljah is deeply concerned with issues of Black women’s oppression, and offers an important perspective on contemporary urban culture. Yet while young Black women listened to Souljah’s music and thought about her ideas, Souljah’s work has been dismissed within feminist classrooms in academia as being “nonfeminist.” Without tapping these nontraditional sources, much of the Black women’s intellectual tradition would remain “not known and hence not believed in” (Williams 1987, 150). At the same time, many Black women academics struggle to find ways to do intellectual work that challenges injustice.They know that being an academic and an intellectual are not necessarily the same thing. Since the 1960s, U.S. Black women have entered faculty positions in higher education in small but unprecedented numbers. These women confront a peculiar dilemma. On the one hand, acquiring the prestige enjoyed by their colleagues often required unquestioned acceptance of academic norms. On the other hand, many of these same norms remain wedded to notions of Black and female inferiority. Finding ways to temper critical responses to academia without unduly jeopardizing their careers constitutes a new challenge for Black women who aim to be intellectuals within academia, especially intellectuals engaged in developing Black feminist thought (Collins 1998a, 95–123). Surviving these challenges requires new ways of doing Black feminist intellectual work. Developing Black feminist thought as critical social theory involves including the ideas of Black women not previously considered intellectuals— many of whom may be working-class women with jobs outside academia—as well as those ideas emanating from more formal, legitimated scholarship. The ideas we share with one another as mothers in extended families, as othermoth- THE POLITICS OF BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT 17 ers in Black communities, as members of Black churches, and as teachers to the Black community’s children have formed one pivotal area where AfricanAmerican women have hammered out a multifaceted Black women’s standpoint. Musicians, vocalists, poets, writers, and other artists constitute another group from which Black women intellectuals have emerged. Building on African-influenced oral traditions, musicians in particular have enjoyed close association with the larger community of African-American women constituting their audience. Through their words and actions, grassroots political activists also contribute to Black women’s intellectual traditions. Producing intellectual work is generally not attributed to Black women artists and political activists. Especially in elite institutions of higher education, such women are typically viewed as objects of study, a classification that creates a false dichotomy between scholarship and activism, between thinking and doing. In contrast, examining the ideas and actions of these excluded groups in a way that views them as subjects reveals a world in which behavior is a statement of philosophy and in which a vibrant, both/and, scholar/activist tradition remains intact. O b j e c t i v e s o f t h e Vo l u m e African-American women’s social location as a collectivity has fostered distinctive albeit heterogeneous Black feminist intellectual traditions that, for convenience in this volume, I call Black feminist thought. Investigations of four basic components of Black feminist thought—its thematic content, its interpretive frameworks, its epistemological approaches, and its significance for empowerment—constitute the core of this volume. All four components have been shaped by U.S. Black women’s placement in a political context that is undergoing considerable change. Thus, Black feminist thought’s core themes, interpretive frameworks, epistemological stances, and insights concerning empowerment will reflect and aim to shape specific political contexts confronting African-American women as a group. In this volume, I aim to describe, analyze, explain the significance of, and contribute to the development of Black feminist thought as critical social theory. In addressing this general goal, I have several specific objectives. First, I summarize selected core themes in Black feminist thought by surveying their historical and contemporary expression. Drawing primarily on the works of AfricanAmerican women scholars and on the thought produced by a wide range of Black women intellectuals, I explore several core themes that preoccupy Black women thinkers. The vast majority of thinkers discussed in the text are, to the best of my knowledge, U.S. Black women. I cite a range of Black women thinkers not because I think U.S. Black women have a monopoly on the ideas presented but because I aim to demonstrate the range and depth of thinkers who exist in U.S. Black civil society. Placing the ideas of ordinary African-American women as 18 BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT well as those of better-known Black women intellectuals at the center of analysis produces a new angle of vision on Black women’s concerns. At the same time, Black feminist thought cannot be developed in isolation from the thought and actions of other groups. Thus, I also include the ideas of diverse thinkers who make important contributions to developing Black feminist thought. Black women must be in charge of Black feminist thought, but being in charge does not mean that others are excluded. Using and furthering an interpretive framework or paradigm that has come to be known as race, class, and gender studies constitute a second objective of Black Feminist Thought. Rejecting additive models of oppression, race, class, and gender studies have progressed considerably since the 1980s.4 During that decade, African-American women scholar-activists, among others, called for a new approach to analyzing Black women’s experiences. Claiming that such experiences were shaped not just by race, but by gender, social class, and sexuality, works such as Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis (1981), “A Black Feminist Statement” drafted by the Combahee River Collective (1982), and Audre Lorde’s (1984) classic volume Sister Outsider stand as groundbreaking works that explored interconnections among systems of oppression. Subsequent work aimed to describe different dimensions of this interconnected relationship with terms such as intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991) and matrix of domination. In this volume, I use and distinguish between both terms in examining how oppression affects Black women. Intersectionality refers to particular forms of intersecting oppressions, for example, intersections of race and gender, or of sexuality and nation. Intersectional paradigms remind us that oppression cannot be reduced to one fundamental type, and that oppressions work together in producing injustice. In contrast, the matrix of domination refers to how these intersecting oppressions are actually organized. Regardless of the particular intersections involved, structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains of power reappear across quite different forms of oppression. My third objective is to develop an epistemological framework that can be used both to assess existing Black feminist thought and to clarify some of the underlying assumptions that impede its development.This issue of epistemology raises some difficult questions. I see the need to define the boundaries that delineate Black feminist thought from other arenas of intellectual inquiry. What criteria, if any, can be applied to ideas to determine whether they are in fact Black and feminist? What essential features does Black feminist thought share with other critical social theories, particularly Western feminist theory, Afrocentric theory, Marxist analyses, and postmodernism? Do African-American women implicitly rely on alternative standards for determining whether ideas are true? Traditional epistemological assumptions concerning how we arrive at “truth” simply are not sufficient to the task of furthering Black feminist thought. In the same way that concepts such as woman and intellectual must be challenged, the process by which we arrive at truth merits comparable scrutiny. While I provide a book- THE POLITICS OF BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT 19 length treatment of these theoretical concerns in Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice, here I focus on the distinguishing features of a Black feminist epistemology. I aim to use this same epistemological framework throughout the volume. Alice Walker describes this process as one whereby “to write the books one wants to read is both to point the direction of vision and, at the same time, to follow it” (1983, 8). This was a very difficult process for me, one requiring that I not only develop standards and guidelines for assessing U.S. Black feminist thought but that I then apply those same standards and guidelines to my own work while I was creating it. For example, in Chapters 2 and 10 I argue that Black women intellectuals best contribute to a Black women’s group standpoint by using their experiences as situated knowers. To adhere to this epistemological tenet required that, when appropriate, I reject the pronouns “they” and “their” when describing U.S. Black women and our ideas and replace these terms with the terms “we,” “us,” and “our.” Using the distancing terms “they” and “their” when describing my own group and our experiences might enhance both my credentials as a scholar and the credibility of my arguments in some academic settings. But by taking this epistemological stance that reflects my disciplinary training as a sociologist, I invoke standards of certifying truth about which I remain ambivalent. In contrast, by identifying my position as a participant in and observer of Black women’s communities, I run the risk of being discredited as being too subjective and hence less scholarly. But by being an advocate for my material, I validate epistemological tenets that I claim are fundamental for Black feminist thought, namely, to equip people to resist oppression and to inspire them to do it (Collins 1998a, 196–200). To me, the suppression of Black women’s intellectual traditions has made this process of feeling one’s way an unavoidable epistemological stance for Black women intellectuals. As Walker points out, “she must be her own model as well as the artist attending, creating, learning from, realizing the model, which is to say, herself” (1983, 8). Finally, I aim to further Black feminist thought’s contributions to empowering African-American women. Empowerment remains an illusive construct and developing a Black feminist politics of empowerment requires specifying the domains of power that constrain Black women, as well as how such domination can be resisted. Ideally, Black feminist thought contributes ideas and analytical frameworks toward this end. Moreover, it is important to remember that Black women’s full empowerment can occur only within a transnational context of social justice. While focused on U.S. Black women, U.S. Black feminism constitutes one of many historically specific social justice projects dedicated to fostering the empowerment of groups within an overarching context of justice. In this sense, Black feminist thought constitutes one part of a much larger social justice project that goes far beyond the experiences of African-American women. 2 2 DISTINGUISHING FEATURES OF BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT I am a product of an intellectual tradition which until twenty-five years ago did not exist within the academy. Like patchwork in a quilt, it is a tradition gathered from meaningful bits and pieces. My tradition has no name, because it embraces more than womanism, Blackness, or African studies, although those terms will do for now. —Barbara Omolade 1994, ix It seems I am running out of words these days. I feel as if I am on a linguistic treadmill that has gradually but unmistakably increased its speed, so that no word I use to positively describe myself or my scholarly projects lasts for more than five seconds. I can no longer justify my presence in academia, for example, with words that exist in the English language. The moment I find some symbol of my presence in the rarefied halls of elite institutions, it gets stolen, co-opted, filled with negative meaning. —Patricia Williams 1995, 27 U .S. Black women’s struggles on this “linguistic treadmill” to name this tradition with “no name” reveal the difficulties of making do with “terms [that] will do for now.” Widely used yet increasingly difficult to define, U.S. Black feminist thought encompasses diverse and often contradictory meanings. Despite the fact that U.S. Black women, in particular, have expended considerable energy on naming Black women’s knowledge, definitional tensions not only persist but encounter changing political climates riddled with new obstacles. When the very vocabulary used to describe Black feminist thought comes under attack, Black women’s self-definitions become even more difficult to achieve. For example, despite continued acceptance among many African-Americans of Afrocentrism as a term referencing traditions of Black consciousness and racial solidarity, academics and media pundits maligned the term in the 1980s and 1990s. Similarly, the pejorative meanings increasingly attached to the term feminist seem designed to discredit a move- 22 BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT ment dedicated to women’s empowerment. Even the term Black fell victim to the deconstructive moment, with a growing number of “Black” intellectuals who do “race” scholarship questioning the very terms used to describe both themselves and their political struggles (see, e.g., Gilroy 1993). Collectively, these developments produced a greatly changed political and intellectual context for defining Black feminist thought. Despite these difficulties, finding some sort of common ground for thinking through the boundaries of Black feminist thought remains important because, as U.S. Black feminist activist Pearl Cleage reminds us, “we have to see clearly that we are a unique group, set undeniably apart because of race and sex with a unique set of challenges” (Cleage 1993, 55). Rather than developing definitions and arguing over naming practices—for example, whether this thought should be called Black feminism, womanism, Afrocentric feminism, Africana womanism, and the like—a more useful approach lies in revisiting the reasons why Black feminist thought exists at all. Exploring six distinguishing features that characterize Black feminist thought may provide the common ground that is so sorely needed both among African-American women, and between AfricanAmerican women and all others whose collective knowledge or thought has a similar purpose. Black feminist thought’s distinguishing features need not be unique and may share much with other bodies of knowledge. Rather, it is the convergence of these distinguishing features that gives U.S. Black feminist thought its distinctive contours. Why U.S. Black Feminist Thought? Black feminism remains important because U.S. Black women constitute an oppressed group. As a collectivity, U.S. Black women participate in a dialectical relationship linking African-American women’s oppression and activism. Dialectical relationships of this sort mean that two parties are opposed and opposite. As long as Black women’s subordination within intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation persists, Black feminism as an activist response to that oppression will remain needed. In a similar fashion, the overarching purpose of U.S. Black feminist thought is also to resist oppression, both its practices and the ideas that justify it. If intersecting oppressions did not exist, Black feminist thought and similar oppositional knowledges would be unnecessary. As a critical social theory, Black feminist thought aims to empower African-American women within the context of social injustice sustained by intersecting oppressions. Since Black women cannot be fully empowered unless intersecting oppressions themselves are eliminated, Black feminist thought supports broad principles of social justice that transcend U.S. Black women’s particular needs. Because so much of U.S. Black feminism has been filtered through the prism D I S T I N G U I S H I N G F E AT U R E S O F B L AC K F E M I N I S T T H O U G H T 23 of the U.S. context, its contours have been greatly affected by the specificity of American multiculturalism (Takaki 1993). In particular, U.S. Black feminist thought and practice respond to a fundamental contradiction of U.S. society. On the one hand, democratic promises of individual freedom, equality under the law, and social justice are made to all American citizens. Yet on the other hand, the reality of differential group treatment based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship status persists. Groups organized around race, class, and gender in and of themselves are not inherently a problem. However, when AfricanAmericans, poor people, women, and other groups discriminated against see little hope for group-based advancement, this situation constitutes social injustice. Within this overarching contradiction, U.S. Black women encounter a distinctive set of social practices that accompany our particular history within a unique matrix of domination characterized by intersecting oppressions. Race is far from being the only significant marker of group difference—class, gender, sexuality, religion, and citizenship status all matter greatly in the United States (Andersen and Collins 1998). Yet for African-American women, the effects of institutionalized racism remain visible and palpable. Moreover, the institutionalized racism that African-American women encounter relies heavily on racial segregation and accompanying discriminatory practices designed t...
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QUESTIONS ON THE POWER OF SELF-DEFINITION
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