RBG AFRIKAN QUEENS LEARNING SERIES 2012

I OFTEN REFER TO BLACK WOMEN IN AMERICA AND THROUGHOUT
THE DIASPORA AS THE MOST OPPRESSED PEOPLE IN THE WORLD,
“THE TRIPLE OPPRESSED” IF YOU WILL, AS THEIRS IS AN OPPRESSION
OF RACISM, ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION AND SEXISM. Thus, I am
providing this booklet of, what I think are, six penetrating essays in order that the
New Afrikan Family may development a more acute insight into the historical and
current issues and concerns of Afrikan women in America. I firmly believe, as a
New Afrikan man and Nationhood Educator, that “YOU CAN TELL THE STATE
OF A NATION BY THE STATION OF ITS WOMEN”. I hope We will benefit
from the effort, Please “NJOY AND PASS FORWARD”.

of 49

THE UNKNOWN POET & QUEEN

DEDICATION
The BLACK WOMAN,...by Marcus Mosiah Garvey Marcus
Mosiah Garvey [1887-1940]

Text was a 2007 Post by:

THE UNKNOWN POET & QUEEN/ ONE OF THE
ORIGINALS THAT HELP ME BUILD RBG
WORLDWIDE 1 NATION AND ONE OF THE
GREATEST POET I HAVE EVER KNOWN…
“ASANTE FOR YOUR LUV AND GENIUS POET”

BLACK QUEEN of BEAUTY,.. thou hast Given
COLOR to The WORLD! Among Other WOMEN Thou
art ROYAL and The FAIREST! Like The BRIGHTEST
of JEWELS in the REGAL DiaDem, Shin'st Thou,.. GODDESS of AFRICA,...
Nature's PUREST EMBLEM! Black Men WorShip at thy VIRGINAL SHRINE of
TRUEST LOVE;.. Because in Thine Eyes are VIRTUE'S STEADY and
HOLYMARK,... As We See in No OTHER,.... Clothed in SILK or FINE LINEN,....
From ANCIENT VENUS,.. The GoDDeSS,...to MYTHICAL HELEN. When
AFRICA stood at the Head of the ELDER NATIONS,.... The Gods Used to TraVel

RBG Afrikan American Women Study Series

of 49

from FOREIGN LANDS to LOOK at THEE On Couch of Costly EASTERN
MATERIALS,... All PERFUMED,....ReClined Thee,... as in Thy Path FlowERS
were Strewn-SWEETEST That BLOOMED. Thy TRANSCENDENT
MARVELOUS BEAUTY made the Whole World Mad, Bringing SoLoMon to
TEARS as he viewed Thy ComeLiness;......... Anthony and the Elder Ceasars wept
at thy ROYAL FEET,..PreFerring Death than to Leave Thy Presence,.... their Foes
to Meet. YOU,..... in All Ages have ATTRACTED The ADORING WORLD,...And
caused Many a Bloody Banner to be UnFurled,.....YOU,.. have Sat Upon EXALTED
and LOFTY EMINENCE,..... To See a World Fight in YOUR ANCIENT AFRICAN
DEFENSE. ToDay YOU have been DeTHRONED,Through the WEAKNESS of
Your MEN, While,in Frenzy those Who of Yore CRAVED YOUR SMILES and
YOUR HAND Those who were All MONSTERS and Could Not with LOVE
APPROACH YOU. ....have INSULTED YOUR PRIDE and Now ATTACK YOUR
GOOD VIRTUE. Because of DisUNION YOU became MOTHER of The
WORLD,... Giving TINGE of ROBUST COLOR To FIVE CONTINENTS, Making
a GREATER WORLD of MILLIONS of COLORED RACES,... Whose CLAIM To
BEAUTY is REFLECTED Through OUR BLACK FACES. From the HANDSOME
INDIAN to the EUROPEAN BRUNETTE;... There is a CLAIM for That CREDIT
of Their SUNNY BEAUTY;.... That NO ONE can eVer Take from THEE,.....* 0
QUEEN of ALL WOMEN *,.... Who have Borne TRIALS and TROUBLES and
RACIAL BURDEN. Once More WE SHALL,.. in AFRICA,.. FIGHT and
CONQUER for YOU, RESTORING The PEARLY CROWN That PROUD
QUEEN SHEBA did WEAR. Yea,..it May Mean BLOOD,...IT May Mean
DEATH;.. but Still WE SHALL FIGHT, Bearing OUR BANNERS to VICtORY,......
MEN of AFRICA'S MIGHT. SUPERIOR ANGELS Look Like YOU in HEAVEN
ABOVE,.......For thou art FAIREST,..... QUEEN of The SEASONS,.... QUEEN of
OUR LOVE;....... No ConDition Shall Make Us Ever in LIFE to DESERT
THEE,........ ** SWEET GODDESS of The EVER GREEN LAND and PLACID
BLUE SEA **. ** Marcus Mosiah Garvey ** February 28, 1927


of 49

H y p e r T e x t C o n t e n t s : Bookmarkers upon Download
Why Women's Liberation is Important to
Black Women
By Maxine Williams

The Struggle for Women’s Equality in
Black America
By Ron Daniels

Ain't She Still a Woman?
By bell hooks

What Can the White Man Say to the
Black Woman?
By Alice Walker

The Color of Violence Against Women
By Angela Davis

Black Feminist Thought in the Matrix of
Domination
By Patricia Hill Collins


of 49

Why Women's Liberation is Important to
Black Women
By Maxine Williams, The Militant, 3 July 1970

In the early part of the sixties, social scientists became more and more interested in the
family structure of blacks. Unemployment and so called crime among Blacks was
increasing and some of these "scientists" decided that the problems of the Black
community were caused by the family pattern among Black people.

Since Blacks were deviating from the "norm" more female heads of households, higher
unemployment, more school "dropouts" these pseudo-scientists claimed that the way to
solve these problems was to build up a more stable Black family in accord with the
American patriarchal pattern.

In 1965, the U.S. government published a booklet entitled "The Negro Family The Case
for National Action." The author (U.S. Dept. of Labor) stated, "In essence, the Negro
community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line
with the rest of American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole."

According to this theory, the institution of slavery led to a breakdown in the Black family
and the development of a so called matriarchy, in which the Black woman was
"dominant." This "matriarchal" structure was held responsible, in turn, for contributing to
the "emasculation" of the Black man. In other words, as these people would have it, the
oppression of black people was partly caused by the chief victims of this oppression,
black women!

This myth of the Black Matriarchy has had wide spread influence, and is even widely
believed in the Black community today. It is something we have to fight against and


of 49

expose. To show just how wrong this theory is, let's look at the real condition and history
of the so called dominant Black woman.

Under slavery, once arriving on American soil, the African social order of Black people
was broken down. Tribes were separated and shipped to different plantations. Slaves
underwent a process of de-socialization and had to adopt a new culture and language.

Up until 1840, black men greatly outnumbered Black women. Sociologist E.F. Frazier
indicates in his book The Negro Family In the U.S. that this probably led to "numerous
cases of sex relations between Negro slaves and indentured white women." The
"marriage" rate between Black men and white women became so high that interracial
marriages were banned.

Prior to this time, Black men were encouraged to marry white women in order to enrich
the slavemaster's plantation with more human labor. The Black man in some instances
was able to select a mate of his choice. However in contrast, the Black woman had little
choice in the selection of her mate. Living in a patriarchal society, she became a mere
breeding instrument.

Just as Black men were chained and branded under slavery, so were Black women. Lying
nude on the slave ship, some women gave birth to children in the scorching hot sun.

There were economic interests involved in the Black women having as many offspring as
she could bear. After her child was born, she was allowed to nurse and fondle the infant
only at the slavemaster's discretion. There are cases of Black women who greatly resisted
being separated from their children and having them placed on the auction block even
though they were subject to flogging. And in some cases, the Black woman took the life
of her own children rather than subject them to the oppression of slavery.

There are those who say that because the Black woman was in charge of carin for the
slavemaster's children, she became an important figure in the household. Nothing could
be further from the truth. The Black woman became the most exploited "member" of the
master's household. She scrubbed the floors, washed dishes, cared for the children and


of 49

was often subjected to the lustful advances of Miss Ann's husband. She became an unpaid
domestic. However, she worked outside as well.

Still today, many Black women continue to work in households as underpaid domestics.
And as W.E.B. DuBois stated in his essay The Servant in the House, "The personal
degradation of their work is so great that any white man of decency would rather cut his
daughter's throat than let her grow up to such a destiny."

In this way arose the "mammy” image of Black women an image so embedded in the
system that its impact is still felt today. Until recently, the mass media has aided in
reinforcing this image of portraying Black women as weighing 200 pounds, holding a
child to her breast, and/or scrubbing floors with a rag around her head. For such a one,
who was constantly portrayed with her head to the floor and her behind facing the ceiling,
it is ludicrous to conceive of any dominant role.

Contrary to popular opinion, all Black women do not willingly submit to the sexual
advances of white men. Probably every Black woman has been told the old myth that the
only ones who have had sexual freedom in this country are the white man and the Black
woman. But, in many instances even physical force has been used to compel Black
women to submit. Frazier gives a case in his book where a Black woman who refused the
sexual advances of a white man was subdued and held to the ground by Black men while
the "Master" stood there whipping her.

In some instances, Black women stood in awe of the white skin of their masters and felt
that copulation with a white man would enhance her slave status. There was also the
possibility that her mulatto offspring would achieve emancipation. Her admiration of
white skin was not very different from the slave mentality of some Blacks which caused
them to identify with their masters.

In some cases, the Black woman who submitted herself sexually played a vital role in
saving the life of the Black man. If she gave the master a "good lovin'," she could
sometimes prevent her husband from being horsewhipped or punished.


of 49

The myth that is being perpetrated in the Black community states that somehow the Black
woman has man aged to escape much of the oppression of slavery and that all avenues of
opportunity were opened to her. Well, this is highly interesting, since in 1870 when the
Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed citizens the right to vote, this right did not apply to the
black woman.

During reconstruction, those Blacks who served as justices of the peace and
superintendents of education, and in municipal and state governments, were men.
Although the reconstruction period was far from being an era of "Black Rule," it is
estimated that thousands of Black men used their votes to help keep the Republicans in
power. The Black women remained an the outside.

To be sure, the Black man had a difficult time exercising his right to vote. Mobs of
whites waited for him at the voting booth. Many were threatened with the loss of jobs and
subjected to the terror of Klan elements. The political activity for the Black an was
relatively ephemeral, but while it lasted, many offices fox the first time were occupied by
them.

The loose ties established between Black men and women during slavery were in many
cases dissolved after emancipation. In order to test their freedom, some Black men who
remained with their wives began flogging them. Previously, this was a practice reserved
only for the white master.

In the late 1860s and early 70s, female heeds of households began to crop up. Black men
who held Jobs as skilled craftsmen, carpenters, etc., were being driven out of these
occupation. Since the Republicans no longer needed the Black vote after 1876, the
"welfare" of Blacks was placed in southern hands. Black men found it very difficult to
obtain jobs and in some instances found employment only as strikebreakers. Black men,
who were made to feel "less of a man" in a racist oppressive system, turned toward Black
women, and began to blame them for the position they occupied.

The black woman, in some cases, left to herself with children to feed, also went looking
for employment. Many went to work in the white man's kitchen. DuBois in the same


of 49

essay mentioned earlier, The Servant In the HOLLY, gives a vivid portrayal of the
exploitation of domestic workers. He speaks of the personal degradation of their work,
the fact that they are still in some instances made to enter and exit by the side door, that
they are referred to by their first name, paid extremely low wages, and subjected to the
sexual exploitation of the "master."

All this proves that because the Black woman worked, it did not make her more
"independent" than the white woman. Rather, she became more subject to the brutal
exploitation of capitalism as black, as worker. as woman.

I mentioned earlier that after emancipation Black men had a difficult time obtaining
employment, that after emancipation he was barred from many of the crafts he had been
trained in under slavery. The labor market for Black women also proved to be a disaster.
Black women entered the needle trades in New York in the l900s, as a cheap source of
labor for the employers, and in Chicago in 1917, Black women who were willing to work
for lower wages, were used to break a strike.

There was general distrust between Black and white workers, and in some cities, white
workers refused to work beside Black women and walked off their jobs.

The Black woman has never held high status in this society. Under slavery she was mated
like cattle and mere breeding instrument. Today, the majority women are still confined to
the most menial and lowest paid occupations domestic and laundry workers, file clerks,
counter workers, and other service occupations. These lobs in most cases are not yet
unionized.

Today, at least 20 percent of Black women are employed as private household workers,
and their median income is $1200. These women have the double exploitation of first
doing drudgery in someone else's home, and then having to take care of their own
households as well. Some are forced to leave their own children without adequate
supervision in order to earn money by taking care of someone else's children.


of 49

Sixty-one percent of Black married women were in the labor force in 1966. Almost one
fourth of Black families are headed by females, double the percentage for whites. Due to
the shortage of Black men, most Black women are forced to accept a relationship on male
terms. In Black communities there sometimes exists a type of serial polygamy a situation
where many women share the same man, one at a time.

As if Black women did not have enough to contend with, being exploited economically
as a worker, being used as a source of cheap labor because she is a female, and being
treated even worse because she is Black, she also finds herself fighting the beauty
"standards" of a white western society.

Years ago it was a common sight to see Black women wearing blond wigs and rouge, the
object being to get as close to the white beauty standard as one possibly could. But, in
spite of the fact that bleaching creams and hair straighteners were used, the trick just
didn't work. Her skin was still black instead of fair, and her hair kinky instead of straight.
She was constantly being compared to the white woman, and she was the antithesis of
what was considered beautiful. Usually when she saw a Black man with a white woman,
the image she had of herself became even more painful.

But now, "Black is beautiful," and the Black woman is playing a more prominent role in
the movement. But there is a catch! She is still being told to step back and let the Black
man come forward and lead. It is ironic that at a time when all talents and abilities should
be utilized to aid in the struggle of national liberation, Stokely Carmichael comes along
and declares that the position of women in the movement is "prone."

And some years later, Eldridge Cleaver in referring to the status of women said they had
"pussy power." Since then, the Black Panther Party has somewhat altered its view, saying
"women are our other half."

When writing their political statement, the Republic of New Africa stated they wanted the
right of all Black men to have as many wives as they can afford. This was based on their
conception that this is the way things were in Africa. (In their publication The New
Africa written in December 1969, one of the points in their Declaration of Independence


of 49

seeks "to assure equality of rights for the sexes." Whether this means that the Black
woman would be allowed to have as many husbands as she can afford, I have no way of
knowing.)

So today, the Black woman still finds herself up the creek. She feels that she must take
the nod from "her man," because if she "acts up" then she just might lose him to a white
woman. She must still subordinate herself, her own feelings and desires, especially when
it comes to the right of having control of her own body.

When the birth control pill first came into use, it was experimentally tested on Puerto
Rican women. It is therefore not surprising that Third World people look at this example
and declare that both birth control and abortion is a form of genocide a device to
eliminate Third World people.

However, what is at issue is the right of women to control their own bodies. Enforced
motherhood is a form of male supremacy; it is reactionary and brutal. During slavery, the
plantation masters forced motherhood on Black women in order to enrich their
plantations with more human labor.

It is women who must decide whether they wish to have children or not. Women must
have the right to control their own bodies. And this means that we must also speak out
against forced sterilization and against compelling welfare mothers to accept
contraceptive methods against their will.

There is now a women's liberation movement growing in the United States. By and large,
Black women have not played a prominent role in this movement. This is due to the fact
that many Black women have not yet developed a feminist consciousness. Black women
see their problem mainly as one of national oppression.

The middle-class mentality of some white women's liberation seem to be irrelevant to
Black women's needs. For instance, at the November 1969 Congress to Unite Women in
New York, some of the participants did not want to take a stand against the school
tracking system fearing that "good" students thrown in with "bad" ones would cause the


of 49

"brilliant" students to leave school, thus lowering the standards. One white woman had
the gall to mention to me that she felt women living in Scarsdale were more oppressed
then Third World women trapped in the ghetto! There was also little attempt to deal with
the problems of poor women, for example the fact that women in Scarsdale exploit Black
women as domestics.

The movement must take a clearer stand against the horrendous conditions in which poor
women are forced to work. Some women in the movement are in favor of eliminating the
state protective laws for women. However, poor women who are forced to work in
sweatshops, factories and laundries need those laws on the books. Not only must the State
protective laws for women remain on the books, but we must see that they are enforced
and made even stronger. I do not mean that those laws which are so "protective" that
women are protected right out of a job should be kept. But any laws that better the
working conditions for women should be strengthened, and extended to men!

Women in the women's liberation movement assert that they are tired of being slaves to
their husbands. confined to the household performing menial tasks. While the Black
woman can sympathize with this view, she does not feel that breaking her ass every day
from nine to five is any form of liberation.

She has always had to work. Before the Emancipation Proclamation she worked in the
fields of the plantation, as Malcolm X would say, "from can't see in the morning until
can't see at night."

And what is liberation under this system? Never owning what you produce, you are
forced to become a mere commodity on the labor market. Workers are never secure, and
their length of employment is subject to the ups and downs in the economy.

Women's liberation must relate to these problems. What is hampering it now is not the
fact that it is still composed of mainly white middle class women, Rather it is the failure
to engage in enough of the type of actions that would draw in and link up with the masses
of women not yet in the movement., including working and Third World women. Issues
such as daycare, support for the striking telephone workers, support for the laws which


of 49

improve working conditions for women, and the campaign to free Joan Bird are a step in
the right direction. (Joan Bird is one of the New York Black Panther members, who was
unjustly held in jail for months awaiting trial, because of the excessively high bond
demanded by the courts.)

I don't feel, however, that white women sitting around a room, browbeating one another
for their "racism," saying, "I'm a racist, I'm a racist," as some women have done, is doing
a damn thing for the Black woman. What is needed is action.

Women's Liberation must not isolate itself from the masses of women or the Third World
community. At the same time, white women cannot speak for Black women. Black
women must speak for themselves.

The Third World Women's Alliance has been formed in New York to begin to do this.
We felt there was a need for a revolutionary Black women's movement that spoke to the
oppression of Black women as Blacks, as workers, as women. We are involved in
reading, discussion, consciousness raising and taking action.

We feel that Black women will have a difficult time relating to the more bitter anti-male
sentiment in the women's liberation movement, fearing that it will be a device to keep
Black men and women fighting among themselves and diverting their energies from the
real enemy. Many Black women realize it will take both men and women to wage an
effective struggle. However, this does not negate the necessity of women building our
own movement because we must build our struggle now and continue it after the
revolution if we are to achieve real emancipation.

When the Third World woman begins to recognize the depth of her oppression, she will
move to form alliances with all revolutionary forces available and settle for nothing less
than complete destruction of this of this racist, capitalist, male-dominated system.


of 49

The Struggle for Women’s Equality in
Black America
By Ron Daniels, the Black World Today, 5 April 2000
As we reflect on the extraordinary contributions of African women in America to the
Black freedom struggle and the sustenance of the Black community, it is also important
to note that Black women have had to confront and overcome double oppression—racism
and sexism. Though there is some evidence that women enjoyed greater status and rights
in ancient and traditional African civilizations and societies, in large measure the
experience of African women in America has been conditioned by the patriarchal values
of the system of male domination operative in Euro-American society.

Generally speaking, for much of the history of Africans in America, the reality is that
inside the Black community Black women worked the fields, nursed the children,
prepared the meals and tended to the housekeeping chores with the assumption that the
man was the head of the household/family and leader in the affairs of the community.
The role of the Black man was to provide for and protect the family and to take care of
his woman. The protests of Black men about the highly provocative movie The Color
Purple notwithstanding, domestic violence against women and incest has also been far
more prevalent than many in the Black community have been willing to acknowledge.

It is a well known that Black women have most often been the backbone of the churches
and civic organizations in the Black community, the worker bees that have made Black
institutions and organizations viable and effective. For much or our history in this
country, however, leadership was seen as a role reserved for men. Hence Black women
often performed the tasks essential to the survival and success of Black institutions and
organizations while Black men enjoyed the fruits of their labor by being the leaders. For
years Black women could be teachers and nurses, but being a doctor, dentist, lawyer,
scientist, engineer was off limits. Similarly, driving a truck or a bus, working on the
assembly line in a manufacturing plant or working in the construction industry was taboo.


of 49

These were considered men’s jobs. To the degree that Black women aspired to enter
these professions and occupations it was often considered a threat to the role of the Black
man as head of the family/household. In the church, the idea that a woman could be a
minister was unthinkable.

Obviously much has changed in Black America as it relates to the struggle for women’s
equality. Indeed, Black women have never been totally subservient within the Black
community. Black women and men have had to stand together in the common fight
against racial oppression and economic exploitation. Hence the struggle for women’s
equality in the Black community has been qualitatively different from the struggle of
White women. Because of the reality of racial oppression, however, sometimes Black
men have been reluctant to confront and address issues of sexism and gender inequality
in the Black community. For some Black men there is a sense that these issues are
somehow subsumed in the larger struggle for racial equality or the belief that these issues
can be deferred until issues of racial oppression have been resolved.

During the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 60’s and 70’s, Black women
increasingly proclaimed that they would not be confined to the clerical and administrative
work and risk their lives as organizers while being excluded from leadership roles.
Though the debate and tensions over the issue of gender inequality was inevitably
influenced by the women’s liberation movement unfolding in the larger society, Black
women evolved their own agenda for equality within the framework of the Black
freedom struggle. While some aspects of the women’s liberation movement were
decidedly anti-male, by and large, this was/is not the case within the Black community.
Black women have simply not been content to play a secondary role in the Black freedom
struggle or to settle for anything less than the right to fulfill their dreams and aspirations
as Black women free of the prejudices, misconceptions and constraints of patriarchy and
male domination.

As I argued during the debates leading up to the Million Man March and Day of Absence
in 1995, equality, collaboration, cooperation and partnership should be the values which
guide Black male-female relationships, not patriarchy. Being put on a pedestal by Black
men is not a substitute for genuine equality, power and leadership in the Black


of 49

community. No occupation, no field of endeavor should be viewed as the exclusive
preserve of men. Black women and men must be free to fulfill their dreams free of
barriers of race, gender and class. And Black men should not feel threatened by the
success and leadership of Black women in the family or the community. Indeed, Black
men have an affirmative duty to fight against sexism/gender inequality and to advocate
for full freedom for Black women. Such a commitment by Black men will give
authenticity to our salutes and tributes to contributions of Black women to the survival
and development of Africans in America. Only when Black women are able to proclaim,
free at last, will the entire race be truly liberated.

Ain't She Still a Woman?
By bell hooks, in Shambhala Sun, January 1999
Increasingly, patriarchy is offered as the solution to the crisis black people face. Black
women face a culture where practically everyone wants us to stay in our place.

Progressive non-black folks, many of them white, often do not challenge black male
support of patriarchy even though they would oppose sexism in other groups of men. In
diverse black communities, and particularly in poor communities, feminism is regarded
with suspicion and contempt. Most folks continue to articulate a vision of racial uplift
that prioritizes the needs of males and valorizes conventional notions of gender roles. As
a consequence black males and females who critique sexism and seek to eradicate
patriarchy in black life receive little support.

Despite all the flaws and proven failures of patriarchal logic, many black people continue
to grasp hold of the model of a benevolent patriarchy healing our wounds. Increasingly,
patriarchy is offered as the solution to the collective crisis that black people face in their
private and public lives.


of 49

Despite feminist critiques of patriarchal narratives of race that suggest black men suffer
the most vicious assaults of white supremacy and racism because they are not empowered
to be "real" men (i.e. patriarchal providers and protectors), most black people, along with
the rest of the culture, continue to believe that a solid patriarchal family will heal the
wounds inflicted by race and class. Frankly, many people cling to this myth because it is
easier for mainstream society to support the idea of benevolent black male domination in
family life than to support the cultural revolutions that would ensure an end to race,
gender and class exploitation.

Many black people understand that the patriarchal two-parent black family often fares
better than matriarchal single-parent households headed by women. Consequently it is
not surprising that at moments of grave crisis, attempting to create a cultural climate that
will promote and sustain patriarchal black families seems a more realistic strategy for
solving the problems.

Of course, that appears more realistic only if one does not bring a hardcore class analysis
to the crisis. For example: many conservative black males have spoken about the
necessity of black men assuming economic responsibility for families, and have
denounced welfare. Yet they do not address in any way where jobs will come from so
that these would-be protectors and providers will be able to take care of the material well-
being of their families.

Black females and males committed to feminist thinking cannot state often enough that
patriarchy will not heal our wounds. On a basic level we can begin to change our
everyday lives in a positive, fundamental way by embracing gender equality and with it a
vision of mutual partnership that includes the sharing of resources, both material and
spiritual. While it is crucial that black children learn early in life to assume responsibility
for their well-being-that they learn discipline and diligence-these valuable lessons need
not be connected to coercive authoritarian regimes of obedience.

While feminism has fundamentally altered the nature of white culture, the way white
folks in families live both in the workplace and home, black female involvement in


of 49

feminist thinking has not had enough meaningful impact on black families. The work of
progressive black woman thinkers to encourage everyone in this society to think in terms
of race, gender, and class has not radically altered the racist and sexist stereotypes that
suggest black women succeed at the expense of black men.

Concurrently, the assumption that white supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture is less
threatened by black women, and therefore is willing to grant us "rewards" denied black
men, has no reality base. Yet it acts as a weapon of cultural genocide in that it encourages
black men to be complicit in the devaluation of black womanhood that helps maintain
existing structures of domination.

To the extent that black men are socialized to see black females as their enemies,
particularly those who are professionally employed, misogynist and sexist assaults are
legitimized.

Black women face a culture where practically everyone wants us to stay in our place (i.e.
be content to accept life on the bottom of this society's economic and social totem pole).

Significantly, even when individual black women are able to advance professionally and
acquire a degree of economic self-sufficiency, it is in the social realm that racist and
sexist stereotypes are continually used both as ways of defining black women's identity
and interpreting our behavior.

For example: if a black woman sits at a predominantly white corporate board meeting
where a heated discussion is taking place and she interrupts, as everyone else has been
doing, her behavior may be deemed hostile and aggressive. Often when I lecture with a
black male colleague and I challenge his points, rather than being perceived as more
intellectually competent, I am deemed castrating, brutal, etc. The reverse happens if he
challenges me in a particularly winning way. He is seen as just more brilliant, more
capable, etc.

Even in feminist circles, individual black women are often subjected to different
standards of evaluation than their peers. When the nationally recognized black woman


of 49

writer Toni Cade Bambara died, the mass media paid little or no attention. Almost a year
after her death Ms. magazine published a long article in which a black woman writer
focused on the poor housekeeping skills of the writer and her failure to conform to a
standard of desired friendship. Nothing was said about the content of her work or its
impact; this was a blatant example of devaluation. It is easy to devalue and de-legitimate
black females who do not conform to standards of bourgeois decorum, who do not come
from the right class backgrounds. No one objects.

Often individual black women are so worried that they will be regarded through the lens
of racist/sexist stereotypes that portray us as dominating, vicious and all-powerful, that
they refuse to make any courageous non-conforming act. They may be more conservative
in standpoint and behavior, more upholding of the status quo, than their non-black and
female counterparts.

They may refuse to consider taking any action in relation to individual self-actualization
or group participation that would be seen as rebellious or transgressive.

Anti-feminist backlash, coupled with narrow forms of Black Nationalism which
wholeheartedly embrace patriarchal thinking, has had a major impact on black females.
Fear of male rage, disapproval and rejection leads some of us to be wary of feminist
politics, to reject feminist thinking. Yet if we do not bring feminism out of the closet and
into our lives, racist/sexist images that ensure and perpetuate the devaluation of black
womanhood will continue to gather cultural momentum.


of 49

What Can the White Man Say to the
Black Woman?
By Alice Walker, address in support of the National
March for Women’s Equality and Women’s Lives in
Washington D.C., 22 May 1989
What is of use in these words I offer in memory of our common mother. And to my
daughter.

What can the white man say to the black woman?

For four hundred years he ruled over the black woman’s womb.

Let us be clear. In the barracoons and along the slave shipping coasts of Africa, for more
than twenty generations, it was he who dashed our babies brains out against the rocks.


For four hundred years he determined which black woman’s children would live or die.

Let it be remembered. It was he who placed our children on the auction block in cities all
across the eastern half of what is now the United States, and listened to and watched them
beg for their mothers’ arms, before being sold to the highest bidder and dragged away.


We remember that Fannie Lou Hamer, a poor sharecropper on a Mississippi plantation,
was one of twenty-one children; and that on plantations across the South black women
often had twelve, fifteen, twenty children. Like their enslaved mothers and grandmothers
before them, these black women were sacrificed to the profit the white man could make
from harnessing their bodies and their children’s bodies to the cotton gin.


We see him lined up on Saturday nights, century after century, to make the black mother,
who must sell her body to feed her children, go down on her knees to him.


of 49

Let us take note:

He has not cared for a single one of the dark children in his midst, over hundreds of
years.

Where are the children of the Cherokee, my great grandmother’s people?

Gone.

Where are the children of the Blackfoot?

Gone.

Where are the children of the Lakota?

Gone.

Of the Cheyenne?

Of the Chippewa?

Of the Iroquois?

Of the Sioux?

Of the Mandinka?

Of the Ibo?

Of the Ashanti?

Where are the children of the Slave Coast and Wounded Knee?

We do not forget the forced sterilizations and forced starvations on the reservations, here
as in South Africa. Nor do we forget the smallpox-infested blankets Indian children were
given by the Great White Fathers of the United States government.

What has the white man to say to the black woman?

When we have children you do everything in your power to make them feel unwanted
from the moment they are born. You send them to fight and kill other dark mothers’
children around the world. You shove them onto public highways in the path of
oncoming cars. You shove their heads through plate glass windows. You string them up
and you string them out.


of 49


From the beginning, you have treated all dark children with absolute hatred.

Thirty million African children died on the way to the Americas, where nothing awaited
them but endless toil and the crack of a bullwhip. They died of a lack of food, of lack of
movement in the holds of ships. Of lack of friends and relatives. They died of depression,
bewilderment and fear.


Let us look around us: Let us look at the world the white man has made for the black
woman and her children.

It is a world in which the black woman is still forced to provide cheap labor, in the form
of children, for the factories and on the assembly lines of the white man.

It is a world into which the white man dumps every foul, person-annulling drug he
smuggles into creation.

It is a world where many of our babies die at birth, or later of malnutrition, and where
many more grow up to live lives of such misery they are forced to choose death by their
own hands.

What has the white man to say to the black woman, and to all women and children
everywhere?

Let us consider the depletion of the ozone; let us consider homelessness and the nuclear
peril; let us consider the destruction of the rain forests in the name of the almighty
hamburger. Let us consider the poisoned apples and the poisoned water and the poisoned
air and the poisoned earth.

And that all of our children, because of the white man’s assault on the planet, have a
possibility of death by cancer in their almost immediate future.

What has the white, male lawgiver to say to any of us? To those of us who love life too
much to willingly bring more children into a world saturated with death?

Abortion, for many women, is more than an experience of suffering beyond anything
most men will ever know; it is an act of mercy, and an act of self-defense.


of 49

To make abortion illegal again is to sentence millions of women and children to
miserable lives and even more miserable deaths.

Given his history, in relation to us, I think the white man should be ashamed to attempt to
speak for the unborn children of the black woman. To force us to have children for him to
ridicule, drug and turn into killers and homeless wanderers is a testament to his
hypocrisy.


Only one thing that the black woman might hear.

Yes, indeed, the white man can say, Your children have the right to life. Therefore I will
call back from the dead those 30 million who were tossed overboard during the centuries
of the slave trade. And the other millions who died in my cotton fields and hanging from
trees.

I will recall all those who died of broken hearts and broken spirits, under the insult of
segregation.

I will raise up all the mothers who died exhausted after birthing twenty-one children to
work sunup to sundown on my plantation. I will restore to full health all those who
perished for lack of food, shelter, sunlight, and love; and from my inability to see them as
human beings.

But I will go even further:

I will tell you, black woman, that I wish to be forgiven the sins I commit daily against
you and your children. For I know that until I treat your chil dren with love, I can never
be trusted by my own. Nor can I respect myself.

And I will free your children from insultingly high infant mortality rates, short life spans,
horrible housing, lack of food, rampant ill health. I will liberate them from the ghetto. I
will open wide the doors of all the schools and hospitals and businesses of society to your
children. I will look at your children and see not a threat but a joy.

I will remove myself as an obstacle in the path that your children, against all odds, are
making toward the light. I will not assassinate them for dreaming dreams and offering


of 49

new visions of how to live. I will cease trying to lead your children, for I can see I have
never understood where I was going. I will agree to sit quietly for a century or so, and
meditate on this.

This is what the white man can say to the black woman.

We are listening.

The Color of Violence Against Women
By Angela Davis, keynote address at the Color of
Violence Conference in Santa Cruz, Colorlines, Vol.3
no.3, Fall 2000
I feel extremely honored to have been invited to deliver this keynote address. This
conference deserves to be called historic on many accounts. It is the first of its kind, and
this is precisely the right intellectual season for such a gathering. The breadth and
complexity of its concerns show the contradictions and possibilities of this historical
moment. And just such a gathering can help us to imagine ways of attending to the
ubiquitous violence in the lives of women of color that also radically subvert the
institutions and discourses within which we are compelled by necessity to think and
work.

I predict that this conference will be remembered as a mile- stone for feminist scholars
and activists, marking a new moment in the history of anti-violence scholarship and
organizing.

Many years ago when I was a student in San Diego, I was driving down the freeway with
a friend when we encountered a black woman wandering along the shoulder. Her story
was extremely disturbing. Despite her uncontrollable weeping, we were able to surmise
that she had been raped and dumped along the side of the road. After a while, she was
able to wave down a police car, thinking that they would help her. However, when the


of 49

white policeman picked her up, he did not comfort her, but rather seized upon the
opportunity to rape her once more.

I relate this story not for its sensational value, but for its metaphorical power.

Given the racist and patriarchal patterns of the state, it is difficult to envision the state as
the holder of solutions to the problem of violence against women of color. However, as
the anti-violence movement has been institutionalized and professionalized, the state
plays an increasingly dominant role in how we conceptualize and create strategies to
minimize violence against women. One of the major tasks of this conference, and of the
anti-violence movement as a whole, is to address this contradiction, especially as it
presents itself to poor communities of color.

The Advent of Domestic Violence

Violence is one of those words that is a powerful ideological conductor, one whose
meaning constantly mutates. Before we do anything else, we need to pay tribute to the
activists and scholars whose ideological critiques made it possible to apply the category
of domestic violence to those concealed layers of aggression systematically directed at
women. These acts were for so long relegated to secrecy or, worse, considered normal.

Many of us now take for granted that misogynist violence is a legitimate political issue,
but let us remember that a little more than two decades ago, most people considered
domestic violence to be a private concern and thus not a proper subject of public
discourse or political intervention. Only one generation separates us from that era of
silence. The first speak-out against rape occurred in the early 1970s, and the first national
organization against domestic violence was founded toward the end of that decade.

We have since come to recognize the epidemic proportions of violence within intimate
relationships and the pervasiveness of date and acquaintance rape, as well as violence
within and against same-sex intimacy. But we must also learn how to oppose the racist
fixation on people of color as the primary perpetrators of violence, including domestic
and sexual violence, and at the same time to fiercely challenge the real violence that men
of color inflict on women. These are precisely the men who are already reviled as the
major purveyors of violence in our society: the gang members, the drug-dealers, the


of 49

drive-by shooters, the burglars, and assailants. In short, the criminal is figured as a black
or Latino man who must be locked into prison.

One of the major questions facing this conference is how to develop an analysis that
furthers neither the conservative project of sequestering millions of men of color in
accordance with the contemporary dictates of globalized capital and its prison industrial
complex, nor the equally conservative project of abandoning poor women of color to a
continuum of violence that extends from the sweatshops through the prisons, to shelters,
and into bedrooms at home.

How do we develop analyses and organizing strategies against violence against women
that acknowledge the race of gender and the gender of race?

Women of Color on the Frontlines

Women of color have been active in the anti-violence movement since its beginnings.
The first national organization addressing domestic violence was founded in 1978 when
the United States Civil Rights Commission Consultation on Battered Women led to the
founding of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. In 1980, the Washington,
D.C. Rape Crisis Center sponsored the First National Conference on Third World
Women and Violence. The following year a Women of Color Task Force was created
within the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. To make some historical
connections, it is significant that the U.S. Third World Women’s Caucus formed that
same year within the National Women Studies Association, and the groundbreaking book
This Bridge Called My Back was first published.

Many of these activists have helped to develop a more complex understanding about the
overlapping, cross-cutting, and often contradictory relationships among race, class,
gender, and sexuality that militate against a simplistic theory of privatized violence in
women’s lives. Clearly, the powerful slogan first initiated by the feminist movement—
the personal is political—is far more complicated than it initially appeared to be.

The early feminist argument that violence against women is not inherently a private
matter, but has been privatized by the sexist structures of the state, the economy, and the
family has had a powerful impact on public consciousness.


of 49

Yet, the effort to incorporate an analysis that does not reify gender has not been so
successful. The argument that sexual and domestic violence is the structural foundation
of male dominance sometimes leads to a hierarchical notion that genital mutilation in
Africa and sati, or wife-burning, in India are the most dreadful and extreme forms of the
same violence against women which can be discovered in less appalling manifestations in
Western cultures.

Other analyses emphasize a greater incidence of misogynist violence in poor
communities and communities of color, without necessarily acknowledging the greater
extent of police surveillance in these communities—directly and through social service
agencies. In other words, precisely because the primary strategies for addressing violence
against women rely on the state and on constructing gendered assaults on women as
crimes, the criminalization process further bolsters the racism of the courts and prisons.
Those institutions, in turn, further contribute to violence against women.

On the one hand, we should applaud the courageous efforts of the many activists who are
responsible for a new popular consciousness of violence against women, for a range of
legal remedies, and for a network of shelters, crisis centers, and other sites where
survivors are able to find support. But on the other hand, uncritical reliance on the
government has resulted in serious problems. I suggest that we focus our thinking on this
contradiction: Can a state that is thoroughly infused with racism, male dominance, class-
bias, and homophobia and that constructs itself in and through violence act to minimize
violence in the lives of women? Should we rely on the state as the answer to the problem
of violence against women?

The soon-to-be-released video by Nicole Cusino (assisted by Ruth Gilmore) on
California prison expansion and its economic impact on rural and urban communities
includes a poignant scene in which Vanessa Gomez describes how the deployment of
police and court anti-violence strategies put her husband away under the Three Strikes
law. She describes a verbal altercation between herself and her husband, who was angry
with her for not cutting up liver for their dog’s meal, since, she said, it was her turn to cut
the liver.


of 49

According to her account, she insisted that she would prepare the dog’s food, but he said
no, he was already doing it. She says that she grabbed him and, in trying to take the knife
away from him, seriously cut her fingers. In the hospital, the incident was reported to the
police. Despite the fact that Ms. Gomez contested the prosecutor’s version of the events,
her husband was convicted of assault. Because of two previous convictions as a juvenile,
he received a sentence under California’s Three Strikes law of 25 years to life, which he
is currently serving.

I relate this incident because it so plainly shows the facility with which the state can
assimilate our opposition to gender domination into projects of racial—which also means
gender—domination.

Militarized Violence

Gina Dent has observed that one of the most important accomplishments of this
conference is to foreground Native American women within the category women of
color. As Kimberle Crenshaw’s germinal study on violence against women suggests, the
situation of Native American women shows that we must also include within our
analytical framework the persisting colonial domination of indigenous nations and
national formations within and outside the presumed terri- torial boundaries of the U.S.
The U.S. colonial state’s racist, sexist, and homophobic brutality in dealing with Native
Americans once again shows the futility of relying upon the juridical or legislative
processes of the state to resolve these problems.

How then can one expect the state to solve the problem of violence against women, when
it constantly recapitulates its own history of colonialism, racism, and war? How can we
ask the state to intervene when, in fact, its armed forces have always practiced rape and
battery against enemy women? In fact, sexual and intimate violence against women has
been a central military tactic of war and domination.

Yet the approach of the neoliberal state is to incorporate women into these agencies of
violence—to integrate the armed forces and the police.

How do we deal with the police killing of Amadou Diallo, whose wallet was putatively
misapprehended as a gun—or Tanya Haggerty in Chicago, whose cell phone was the


of 49

potential weapon that allowed police to justify her killing? By hiring more women as
police officers? Does the argument that women are victimized by violence render them
inefficient agents of violence? Does giving women greater access to official violence help
to minimize informal violence? Even if this were the case, would we want to embrace
this as a solution? Are women essentially immune from the forms of adaptation to
violence that are so foundational to police and military culture?

Carol Burke, a civilian teaching in the U.S. Naval Academy, argues that sadomasochistic
cadence calls have increased since women entered the brigade of midshipmen in 1976.
She quotes military songs that are so cruelly pornographic that I would feel
uncomfortable quoting them in public, but let me give one comparatively less offensive
example:

The ugliest girl I ever did see Was beatin’ her face against a tree I picked her up; I
punched her twice. She said, Oh Middy, you’re much too nice.

If we concede that something about the training structures and the operations they are
expected to carry out makes the men (and perhaps also women) in these institutions more
likely to engage in violence within their intimate relationships, why then is it so difficult
to develop an analysis of violence against women that takes the violence of the state into
account?

The major strategy relied on by the women’s anti-violence movement of criminalizing
violence against women will not put an end to violence against women—just as
imprisonment has not put an end to crime in general.

I should say that this is one of the most vexing issues confronting feminists today. On the
one hand, it is necessary to create legal remedies for women who are survivors of
violence. But on the other hand, when the remedies rely on punishment within
institutions that further promote violence—against women and men, how do we work
with this contradiction?

How do we avoid the assumption that previously private modes of violence can only be
rendered public within the context of the state’s apparatus of violence?

The Crime Bill


of 49

It is significant that the 1994 Violence Against Women Act was passed by Congress as
Title IV of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994—the Crime
Bill. This bill attempted to address violence against women within domestic contexts, but
at the same time it facilitated the incarceration of more women—through Three Strikes
and other provisions. The growth of police forces provided for by the Crime Bill will
certainly increase the numbers of people subject to the brutality of police violence.

Prisons are violent institutions. Like the military, they render women vulnerable in an
even more systematic way to the forms of violence they may have experienced in their
homes and in their communities. Women’s prison experiences point to a continuum of
violence at the intersection of racism, patriarchy, and state power.

A Human Rights Watch report entitled All Too Familiar: Sexual Abuse of Women in
U.S. Prisons says: Our findings indicate that being a woman prisoner in U.S. state prisons
can be a terrifying experience. If you are sexually abused, you cannot escape from your
abuser. Grievance or investigatory procedures, where they exist, are often ineffectual, and
correctional employees continue to engage in abuse because they believe they will rarely
be held accountable, administratively or criminally. Few people outside the prison walls
know what is going on or care if they do know. Fewer still do anything to address the
problem.

Recently, 31 women filed a class action law suit against the Michigan Department of
Corrections, charging that the department failed to prevent sexual violence and abuse by
guards and civilian staff. These women have been subjected to serious retaliations,
including being raped again!

At Valley State Prison in California, the chief medical officer told Ted Koppel on
national television that he and his staff routinely subjected women to pelvic
examinations, even if they just had colds. He explained that these women have been
imprisoned for a long time and have no male contact, and so they actually enjoy these
pelvic examinations. Koppel sent the tape of this interview to the prison and he was
eventually dismissed. According to the Department of Corrections, he will never be
allowed to have contact with patients again. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The fact


of 49

that he felt able to say this on national television gives you a sense of the horrendous
conditions in women’s prisons.

There are no easy solutions to all the issues I have raised and that so many of you are
working on. But what is clear is that we need to come together to work toward a far more
nuanced framework and strategy than the anti-violence movement has ever yet been able
to elaborate.

We want to continue to contest the neglect of domestic violence against women, the
tendency to dismiss it as a private matter. We need to develop an approach that relies on
political mobilization rather than legal remedies or social service delivery. We need to
fight for temporary and long-term solutions to violence and simultaneously think about
and link global capitalism, global colonialism, racism, and patriarchy—all the forces that
shape violence against women of color. Can we, for example, link a strong demand for
remedies for women of color who are targets of rape and domestic violence with a
strategy that calls for the abolition of the prison system?

I conclude by asking you to support the new organization initiated by Andrea Smith, the
organizer of this conference. Such an organization contesting violence against women of
color is especially needed to connect, advance, and organize our analytic and organizing
efforts. Hopefully this organization will act as a catalyst to keep us thinking and moving
together in the future.


of 49

Black Feminist Thought in the Matrix of
Domination
From Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought:
Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of
Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), pp. 221–
238
Black feminist thought demonstrates Black women's emerging power as agents of
knowledge. By portraying African-American women as self-defined, self-reliant
individuals confronting race, gender, and class oppression, Afrocentric feminist thought
speaks to the importance that oppression, Afrocentric feminist thought speaks to the
importance that knowledge plays in empowering oppressed people. One distinguishing
feature of Black feminist thought is its insistence that both the changed consciousness of
individuals and the social transformation of political and economic institutions constitute
essential ingredients for social change. New knowledge is important for both dimensions
to change.

Knowledge is a vitally important part of the social relations of domination and resistance.
By objectifying African-American women and recasting our experiences to serve the
interests of elite white men, much of the Eurocentric masculinist worldview fosters Black
women's subordination. But placing Black women's experiences at the center of analysis
offers fresh insights on the prevailing concepts, paradigms, and epistemologies of this
worldview and on its feminist and Afrocentric critiques. Viewing the world through a
both/and conceptual lens of the simultaneity of race, class, and gender oppression and of
the need for a humanist vision of community creates new possibilities for an empowering
Afrocentric feminist knowledge. Many Black feminist intellectuals have long thought
about the world in this way because this is the way we experience the world.

Afrocentric feminist thought offers two significant contributions toward furthering our
understanding of the important connections among knowledge, consciousness, and the
politics of empowerment. First, Black feminist thought fosters a fundamental


of 49

paradigmatic shift in how we think about oppression. By embracing a paradigm of race,
class, and gender as interlocking systems of oppression, Black feminist thought
reconceptualizes the social relations of dommation and resistance. Second, Black feminist
thought addresses ongoing epistemological debates in feminist theory and in the
sociology of knowledge concerning ways of assessing "truth." Offering subordinate
groups new knowledge about their own experiences can be empowering. But revealing
new ways of knowing that allow subordinate groups to define their own reality has far
greater implications.

Reconceptualizing Race, Class, and Gender as Interlocking Systems of
Oppression

"What I really feel is radical is trying to make coalitions with people who are different
from you," maintains Barbara Smith. "I feel it is radical to be dealing with race and sex
and class and sexual identity all at one time. I think that is really radical because it has
never been done before." Black feminist thought fosters a fundamental paradigmatic shift
that rejects additive approaches to oppression. Instead of starting with gender and then
adding in other variables such as age, sexual orientation, race, social class, and religion,
Black feminist thought sees these distinctive systems of oppression as being part of one
overarching structure of domination. Viewing relations of domination for Black women
for any given sociohistorical context as being structured via a system of interlocking race,
class, and gender oppression expands the focus of analysis from merely describing the
similarities and differences distinguishing these systems of oppression and focuses
greater attention on how they interconnect. Assummg that each system needs the others
in order to function creates a distinct theoretical stance that stimulates the rethinking of
basic social science concepts.

Afrocentric feminist notions of family reflect this reconceptualization process. Black
women's experiences as bloodmothers, othermothers, and community othermothers
reveal that the mythical norm of a heterosexual, married couple, nuclear family with a
nonworking spouse and a husband earning a "family wage" is far from being natural,
universal and preferred but instead is deeply embedded in specific race and class


of 49

formations. Placmg African-American women in the center of analysis not only reveals
much-needed information about Black women's experiences but also questions
Eurocentric masculinist perspectives on family

Black women's experiences and the Afrocentric feminist thought rearticulating them also
challenge prevailing definitions of community. Black women's actions in the struggle or
group survival suggest a vision of community that stands in opposition to that extant in
the dominant culture. The definition of community implicit in the market model sees
community as arbitrary and fragile, structured fundamentally by competition and
domination. In contrast, Afrocentric models of community stress connections, caring, and
personal accountability. As cultural workers African-American women have rejected the
generalized ideology of domination advanced by the dominant group in order to conserve
Afrocentric conceptualizations of community. Denied access to the podium, Black
women have been unable to spend time theorizing about alternative conceptualizations of
community. Instead, through daily actions African-American women have created
alternative communities that empower.

This vision of community sustained by African-American women in conjunction with
African-American men addresses the larger issue of reconceptualizing power. The type of
Black women's power discussed here does resemble feminist theories of power which
emphasize energy and community. However, in contrast to this body of literature whose
celebration of women's power is often accompanied by a lack of attention to the
importance of power as domination, Black women's experiences as mothers, community
othermothers, educators, church leaders, labor union center-women, and community
leaders seem to suggest that power as energy can be fostered by creative acts of
resistance.

The spheres of influence created and sustained by African-American women are not
meant solely to provide a respite from oppressive situations or a retreat from their effects.
Rather, these Black female spheres of influence constitute potential sanctuaries where
individual Black women and men are nurtured in order to confront oppressive social
institutions. Power from this perspective is a creative power used for the good of the


of 49

community, whether that community is conceptualized as one's family, church
community, or the next generation of the community's children. By making the
community stronger, Atrican-American women become empowered, and that same
community can serve as a source of support when Black women encounter race, gender,
and class oppression. . . .

Approaches that assume that race, gender, and class are interconnected have immediate
practical applications. For example, African-American women continue to be
inadequately protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The primary purpose
of the statute is to eradicate all aspects of discrimination. But judicial treatment of Black
women's employment discrimination claims has encouraged Black women to identify
race or sex as the so-called primary discrimination. "To resolve the inequities that
confront Black women," counsels Scarborough, the courts must first correctly
conceptualize them as 'Black women,' a distinct class protected by Title VII." Such a
shift, from protected categories to protected classes of people whose Title VII claims
might be based on more than two discriminations, would work to alter the entire basis of
current antidiscrimination efforts.

Reconceptualizing phenomena such as the rapid growth of female-headed households in
African-American communities would also benefit from a race-, class-, and gender-
inclusive analysis. Case studies of Black women heading households must be attentive to
racially segmented local labor markets and community patterns, to changes in local
political economies specific to a given city or region, and to established racial and gender
ideology for a given location. This approach would go far to deconstruct Eurocentric,
masculinist analyses that implicitly rely on controlling images of the matriarch or the
welfare mother as guiding conceptual premises. . . . Black feminist thought that
rearticulates experiences such as these fosters an enhanced theoretical understanding of
how race, gender, and class oppression are part of a single, historically created system.

The Matrix of Domination


of 49

Additive models of oppression are firmly rooted in the either/or dichotomous thinking of
Eurocentric, masculinist thought. One must be either Black or white in such thought
systems--persons of ambiguous racial and ethnic identity constantly battle with questions
such as "what are your, anyway?" This emphasis on quantification and categorization
occurs in conjunction with the belief that either/or categories must be ranked. The search
for certainty of this sort requires that one side of a dichotomy be privileged while its other
is denigrated. Privilege becomes defined in relation to its other.

Replacing additive models of oppression with interlocking ones creates possibilities for
new paradigms. The significance of seeing race, class, and gender as interlocking systems
of oppression is that such an approach fosters a paradigmatic shift of thinking inclusively
about other oppressions, such as age, sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity. Race,
class, and gender represent the three systems of oppression that most heavily affect
African-American women. But these systems and the economic, political, and ideological
conditions that support them may not be the most fundamental oppressions, and they
certainly affect many more groups than Black women. Other people of color, Jews, the
poor white women, and gays and lesbians have all had similar ideological justifications
offered for their subordination. All categories of humans labeled Others have been
equated to one another, to animals, and to nature.

Placing African-American women and other excluded groups in the center of analysis
opens up possibilities for a both/and conceptual stance, one in which all groups possess
varying amounts of penalty and privilege in one historically created system. In this
system, for example, white women are penalized by their gender but privileged by their
race. Depending on the context, an individual may be an oppressor, a member of an
oppressed group, or simultaneously oppressor and oppressed.

Adhering to a both/and conceptual stance does not mean that race, class, and gender
oppression are interchangeable. For example, whereas race, class, and gender oppression
operate on the social structural level of institutions, gender oppression seems better able
to annex the basic power of the erotic and intrude in personal relationships via family
dynamics and within individual consciousness. This may be because racial oppression


of 49

has fostered historically concrete communities among African-Americans and other
racial/ethnic groups. These communities have stimulated cultures of resistance. While
these communities segregate Blacks from whites, they simultaneously provide counter-
institutional buffers that subordinate groups such as African-Americans use to resist the
ideas and institutions of dominant groups. Social class may be similarly structured.
Traditionally conceptualized as a relationship of individual employees to their employers,
social class might be better viewed as a relationship of communities to capitalist political
economies. Moreover, significant overlap exists between racial and social class
oppression when viewing them through the collective lens of family and community.
Existing community structures provide a primary line of resistance against racial and
class oppression. But because gender cross-cuts these structures, it finds fewer
comparable institutional bases to foster resistance.

Embracing a both/and conceptual stance moves us from additive, separate systems
approaches to oppression and toward what I now see as the more fundamental issue of
the social relations of domination. Race, class, and gender constitute axes of oppression
that characterize Black women's experiences within a more generalized matrix of
domination. Other groups may encounter different dimensions of the matrix, such as
sexual orientation, religion, and age, but the overarching relationship is one of
domination and the types of activism it generates.

Bell Hooks labels this matrix a "politic of domination" and describes how it operates
along interlocking axes of race, class, and gender oppression. This politic of domination

refers to the ideological ground that they share, which is a belief in domination, and a
belief in the notions of superior and inferior, which are components of all of those
systems. For me it's like a house, they share the foundation, but the foundation is the
ideological beliefs around which notions of domination are constructed.

Johnella Butler claims that new methodologies growing from this new paradigm would
be "non-hierarchical" and would "refuse primacy to either race, class, gender, or
ethnicity, demanding instead a recognition of their matrix-like interaction." Race, class,


of 49

and gender may not be the most fundamental or important systems of oppression, but
they have most profoundly affected African-American women. One significant
dimension of Black feminist thought is its potential to reveal insights about the social
relations of domination organized along other axes such as religion, ethnicity, sexual
orientation, and age. Investigating Black women's particular experiences thus promises to
reveal much about the more universal process of domination.

Multiple Levels of Domination

In addition to being structured along axes such as race, gender, and social class, the
matrix of domination is structured on several levels. People experience and resist
oppression on three levels: the level of personal biography; the group or community level
of the cultural context created by race, class, and gender; and the systemic level of social
institutions. Black feminist thought emphasizes all three levels as sites of domination and
as potential sites of resistance.

Each individual has a unique personal biography made up of concrete experiences,
values, motivations, and emotions. No two individuals occupy the same social space; thus
no two biographies are identical. Human ties can be freeing and empowering, as is the
case with Black women's heterosexual love relationships or in the power of motherhood
in African-American families and communities. Human ties can also be confining and
oppressive. Situations of domestic violence and abuse or cases in which controlling
images foster Black women's internalized oppression represent domination on the
personal level. The same situation can look quite different depending on the
consciousness one brings to interpret it.

This level of individual consciousness is a fundamental area where new knowledge can
generate change. Traditional accounts assume that power as domination operates from the
top down by forcing and controlling unwilling victims to bend to the will of more
powerful superiors. But these accounts fail to account for questions concerning why, for
example, women stay with abusive men even with ample opportunity to leave or why
slaves did not kill their owners more often. The willingness of the victim to collude in her


of 49

or his own victimization becomes lost. They also fail to account for sustained resistance
by victims, even when chances for victory appear remote. By emphasizing the power of
self-definition and the necessity of a free mind, Black feminist thought speaks to the
importance African-American women thinkers place on consciousness as a sphere of
freedom. Black women intellectuals realize that domination operates not only by
structuring power from the top down but by simultaneously annexing the power as
energy of those on the bottom for its own ends. In their efforts to rearticulate the
standpoint of African-American women as a group, Black feminist thinkers offer
individual African-American women the conceptual tools to resist oppression.

The cultural context formed by those experiences and ideas that are shared with other
members of a group or community which give meaning to individual biographies
constitutes a second level at which domination is experienced and resisted. Each
individual biography is rooted in several overlapping cultural contexts--for example,
groups defined by race, social class, age, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. The
cultural component contributes, among other things, the concepts used in thinking and
acting, group validation of an individual's interpretation of concepts, the "thought
models" used in the acquisition of knowledge, and standards used to evaluate individual
thought and behavior. The most cohesive cultural contexts are those with identifiable
histories, geographic locations, and social institutions. For Black women African-
American communities have provided the location for an Afrocentric group perspective
to endure.

Subjugated knowledges, such as a Black women's culture of resistance, develop in
cultural contexts controlled by oppressed groups. Dominant groups aim to replace
subjugated knowledge with their own specialized thought because they realize that
gaining control over this dimension of subordinate groups' lives simplifies control. While
efforts to influence this dimension of an oppressed group's experiences can be partially
successful, this level is more difficult to control than dominant groups would have us
believe. For example, adhering to externally derived standards of beauty leads many
African-American women to dislike their skin color or hair texture. Similarly,
internalizing Eurocentric gender ideology leads some Black men to abuse Black women.


of 49

These are cases of the successful infusion of the dominant group's specialized thought
into the everyday cultural context of African-Americans. But the long-standing existence
of a Black women's culture of resistance as expressed through Black women's
relationships with one another, the Black women's blues tradition, and the voices of
contemporary African-American women writers all attest to the difficulty of eliminating
the cultural context as a fundamental site of resistance.

Domination is also experienced and resisted on the third level of social institutions
controlled by the dominant group: namely, schools, churches, the media, and other formal
organizations. These institutions expose individuals to the specialized thought
representing the dominant group's standpoint and interests. While such institutions offer
the promise of both literacy and other skills that can be used for individual empowerment
and social transformation, they simultaneously require docility and passivity. Such
institutions would have us believe that the theorizing of elites constitutes the whole of
theory. The existence of African-American women thinkers such as Maria Stewart,
Sojourner Truth, Zora Neale Hurston, and Fannie Lou Hamer who, though excluded from
and/or marginalized within such institutions, continued to produce theory effectively
opposes this hegemonic view. Moreover, the more recent resurgence of Black feminist
thought within these institutions, the case of the outpouring of contemporary Black
feminist thought in history and literature, directly challenges the Eurocentric masculinist
thought pervading these institutions.

Resisting the Matrix of Domination

Domination operates by seducing, pressuring, or forcing African-American women and
members of subordinated groups to replace individual and cultural ways of knowing with
the dominant group's specialized thought. As a result, suggests Audre Lorde, "the true
focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to
escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us." Or as
Toni Cade Bambara succinctly states, "revolution begins with the self, in the self."


of 49

Lorde and Bambara's suppositions raise an important issue for Black feminist
intellectuals and for all scholars and activists working for social change. Although most
individuals have little difficulty identifying their own victimization within some major
system of oppression--whether it be by race, social class, religion, physical ability, sexual
orientation, ethnicity, age or gender--they typically fail to see how their thoughts and
actions uphold someone else's subordination. Thus white feminists routinely point with
confidence to their oppression as women but resist seeing how much their white skin
privileges them. African-Americans who possess eloquent analyses of racism often
persist in viewing poor white women as symbols of white power. The radical left fares
little better. "If only people of color and women could see their true class interests," they
argue, "class solidarity would eliminate racism and sexism." In essence, each group
identifies the oppression with which it feels most comfortable as being fundamental and
classifies all others as being of lesser importance. Oppression is filled with such
contradictions because these approaches fail to recognize that a matrix of domination
contains few pure victims or oppressors. Each individual derives varying amounts of
penalty and privilege from the multiple systems of oppression which frame everyone's
lives.

A broader focus stresses the interlocking nature of oppressions that are structured on
multiple levels, from the individual to the social structural, and which are part of a larger
matrix of domination. Adhering to this inclusive model provides the conceptual space
needed for each individual to see that she or he is both a member of multiple dominant
groups and a member of multiple subordinate groups. Shifting the analysis to
investigating how the matrix of domination is structured along certain axes--race, gender,
and class being the axes of investigation for AfricanAmerican women--reveals that
different systems of oppression may rely in varying degrees on systemic versus
interpersonal mechanisms of domination.

Empowerment involves rejecting the dimensions of knowledge, whether personal,
cultural, or institutional, that perpetuate objectification and dehumanization. African-
American women and other individuals in subordinate groups become empowered when
we understand and use those dimensions of our individual, group, and disciplinary ways


of 49

of knowing that foster our humanity as fully human subjects. This is the case when Black
women value our self-definitions, participate in a Black women's activist tradition,
invoke an Afrocentric feminist epistemology as central to our worldview, and view the
skills gained in schools as part of a focused education for Black community development.
C. Wright Mills identifies this holistic epistemology as the "sociological imagination"
and identifies its task and its promise as a way of knowing that enables individuals to
grasp the relations between history and biography within society. Using one's standpoint
to engage the sociological imagination can empower the individual. "My fullest
concentration of energy is available to me," Audre Lorde maintains, "only when I
integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my
living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restriction
of externally imposed definition."

Black Women as Agents of Knowledge

Living life as an African-American woman is a necessary prerequisite for producing
Black feminist thought because within Black women's communities thought is validated
and produced with reference to a particular set of historical, material, and epistemological
conditions. African-American women who adhere to the idea that claims about Black
women must be substantiated by Black women's sense of our own experiences and who
anchor our knowledge claims in an Afrocentric feminist epistemology have produced a
rich tradition of Black feminist thought.

Traditionally such women were blues singers, poets, autobiographers, storytellers, and
orators validated by everyday Black women as experts on a Black women's standpoint.
Only a few unusual African-American feminist scholars have been able to defy
Eurocentric masculinist epistemologies and explicitly embrace an Afrocentric feminist
epistemology. Consider Alice Walker's description of Zora Neal Hurston:

In my mind, Zora Neale Hurston, Billie Holiday, and Bessie Smith form a sort of unholy
trinity. Zora belongs in the tradition of black women singers, rather than among "the


of 49

literati." . . . Like Billie and Jessie she followed her own road, believed in her own gods
pursued her own dreams, and refused to separate herself from "common" people.

Zora Neal Hurston is an exception for prior to 1950, few African-American women
earned advanced degrees and most of those who did complied with Eurocentric
masculinist epistemologies. Although these women worked on behalf of Black women,
they did so within the confines of pervasive race and gender oppression. Black women
scholars were in a position to see the exclusion of African-American women from
scholarly discourse, and the thematic content of their work often reflected their interest in
examining a Black women's standpoint. However, their tenuous status in academic
institutions led them to adhere to Eurocentric masculinist epistemologies so that their
work would be accepted as scholarly. As a result, while they produced Black feminist
thought, those African-American women most likely to gain academic credentials were
often least likely to produce Black feminist thought that used an Afrocentric feminist
epistemology.

An ongoing tension exists for Black women as agents of knowledge, a tension rooted in
the sometimes conflicting demands of Afrocentricity and feminism. Those Black women
who are feminists are critical of how Black culture and many of its traditions oppress
women. For example, the strong pronatal beliefs in African-American communities that
foster early motherhood among adolescent girls, the lack of self-actualization that can
accompany the double-day of paid employment and work in the home, and the emotional
and physical abuse that many Black women experience from their fathers, lovers, and
husbands all reflect practices opposed by African-American women who are feminists.
But these same women may have a parallel desire as members of an oppressed racial
group to affirm the value of that same culture and traditions. Thus strong Black mothers
appear in Black women's literature, Black women's economic contributions to families is
lauded, and a curious silence exists concerning domestic abuse.

As more African-American women earn advanced degrees, the range of Black feminist
scholarship is expanding. Increasing numbers of African-American women scholars are
explicitly choosing to ground their work in Black women's experiences, and, by doing so,


of 49

they implicitly adhere to an Afrocentric feminist epistemology. Rather than being
restrained by their both/and status of marginality, these women make creative use of their
outsider-within status and produce innovative Afrocentric feminist thought. The
difficulties these women face lie less in demonstrating that they have mastered white
male epistemologies than in resisting the hegemonic nature of these patterns of thought in
order to see, value, and use existing alternative Afrocentric feminist ways of knowing.

In establishing the legitimacy of their knowledge claims, Black women scholars who
want to develop Afrocentric feminist thought may encounter the often conflicting
standards of three key groups. First, Black feminist thought must be validated by ordinary
Atrican-American women who, in the words of Hannah Nelson, grow to womanhood "in
a world where the saner you are, the madder you are made to appear." To be credible in
the eyes of this group, scholars must be personal advocates for their material, be
accountable for the consequences of their work, have lived or experienced their material
in some fashion, and be willing to engage in dialogues about their findings with ordinary,
everyday people. Second, Black feminist thought also must be accepted by the
community of Black women scholars. These scholars place varying amounts of
importance on rearticulating a Black women's standpoint using an Afrocentric feminist
epistemology. Third, Afrocentric feminist thought within academia must be prepared to
confront Eurocentric masculinist political and epistemological requirements.

The dilemma facing Black women scholars engaged in creating Black feminist thought is
that a knowledge claim that meets the criteria of adequacy for one group and thus is
judged to be an acceptable knowledge claim may not be translatable into the terms of a
different group. Using the example of Black English, June Jordan illustrates the difficulty
of moving among epistemologies:

You cannot "translate" instances of Standard English preoccupied with abstraction or
with nothing/nobody evidently alive into Black English. That would warp the language
into uses antithetical to the guiding perspective of its community of users. Rather you
must first change those Standard English sentences, themselves, into ideas consistent
with the person-centered assumptions of Black English.


of 49

Although both worldviews share a common vocabulary, the ideas themselves defy direct
translation.

For Black women who are agents of knowledge, the marginality that accompanies
outsider-within status can be the source of both frustration and creativity. In an attempt to
minimize the differences between the cultural context of African-American communities
and the expectations of social institutions, some women dichotomize their behavior and
become two different people. Over time, the strain of doing this can be enormous. Others
reject their cultural context and work against their own best interests by enforcing the
dominant group's specialized thought. Still others manage to inhabit both contexts but do
so critically, using their outsider-within perspectives as a source of insights and ideas.
But while outsiders within can make substantial personal cost. "Eventually it comes to
you," observes Lorraine Hansberry, "the thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at
all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely."

Once Black feminist scholars face the notion that, on certain dimensions of a Black
women's standpoint, it may be fruitless to try and translate ideas from an Afrocentric
feminist epistemology into a Eurocentric masculinist framework, then other choices
emerge. Rather than trying to uncover universal knowledge claims that can withstand the
translation from one epistemology to another (initially, at least), Black women
intellectuals might find efforts to rearticulate a Black women's standpoint especially
fruitful. Rearticulating a Black women's standpoint refashions the concrete and reveals
the more universal human dimensions of Black women's everyday lives. "I date all my
work," notes Nikki Giovanni, "because I think poetry, or any writing, is but a reflection
of the moment. The universal comes from the particular." Bell Hooks maintains, "my
goal as a feminist thinker and theorist is to take that abstraction and articulate it in a
language that renders it accessible--not less complex or rigorous--but simply more
accessible." The complexity exists; interpreting it remains the unfulfilled challenge for
Black women intellectuals.

Situated Knowledge, Subjugated Knowledge, and Partial Perspectives


of 49

"My life seems to be an increasing revelation of the intimate trace of universal struggle,"
claims June Jordan:

You begin with your family and the kids on the block, and next you open your eyes to
what you call your people and that leads you into land reform into Black English into
Angola leads you back to your own bed where you lie by yourself; wondering it you
deserve to be peaceful, or trusted or desired or left to the freedom of your own unfaltering
heart. And the scale shrinks to the use of a skull: your own interior cage.

Lorraine Hansberry expresses a similar idea: "I believe that one of the most sound ideas
in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great
attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from the truthful identity of what
is." Jordan and Hansberry's insights that universal struggle and truth may wear a
particularistic, intimate face suggest a new epistemological stance concerning how we
negotiate competing knowledge claims and identify "truth."

The context in which African-American women's ideas are nurtured or suppressed
matters. Understanding the content and epistemology of Black women's ideas as
specialized knowledge requires attending to the context from which those ideas emerge.
While produced by individuals, Black feminist thought as situated knowledge is
embedded in the communities in which African-American women find ourselves.

A Black women's standpoint and those of other oppressed groups is not only embedded
in a context but exists in a situation characterized by domination. Because Black women's
ideas have been suppressed, this suppression has stimulated African-American women to
create knowledge that empowers people to resist domination. Thus Afrocentric feminist
thought represents a subjugated knowledge. A Black women's standpoint may provide a
preferred stance from which to view the matrix of domination because, in principle,
Black feminist thought as specialized thought is less likely than the specialized
knowledge produced by dominant groups to deny the connection between ideas and the
vested interests of their creators. However, Black feminist thought as subjugated


RBG AFRIKAN QUEENS LEARNING SERIES 2012

RBG AFRIKAN QUEENS LEARNING SERIES 2012

Recommandé

Recommandé

Contenu connexe

Tendances

Tendances (20)

En vedette

En vedette (18)

Similaire à RBG AFRIKAN QUEENS LEARNING SERIES 2012

Similaire à RBG AFRIKAN QUEENS LEARNING SERIES 2012 (7)

Plus de RBG Communiversity

Plus de RBG Communiversity (20)

Dernier

Dernier (20)

RBG AFRIKAN QUEENS LEARNING SERIES 2012