Theorizing Black Feminisms

The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women

Abena P. A. Busia, Stanlie M. James, Abena P. A. Busia, Stanlie M. James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415073370
• eBook ISBN: 9781134906673
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Theorizing Black Feminisms outlines some of the crucial debates going on within contemporary Black feminist activity. In doing so it brings together a collection of some of the most exciting work by contemporary Black women scholars, celebrating Black women's agency and pragmatic activism. The volume encompasses a wide range of diverse subjects, refusing to be limited by notions of disciplinary boundaries or divisions between theory and practice. Essays on literature, sociology, history, political science, anthropology and art, are included, making the collection vital reading for anyone - activist, student, artist or scholar - interested in exploring the multidisciplinary possibilities of Black feminisms. An exciting and innovative book which both reflects and intervenes in a rapidly growing field.

Part I
ON REVISIONING PARADIGMS

1
THEORIZING RACE, CLASS AND GENDER
The new scholarship of Black feminist intellectuals and Black women’s labor

Rose M.Brewer

At the centre of the theorizing about race, class and gender in the USA is a group of Black feminist intellectuals. These are academics, independent scholars and activists who are writing and rethinking the African-American experience from a feminist perspective. In this chapter, I am most concerned with the ideas of those women involved in knowledge production who are situated in the academy: colleges and universities throughout the USA. Their insights are essential to the rethinking which must occur in conceptualizing the African-American experience. Although they are few in number, their recent placement in Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies and traditional disciplines such as sociology, political science, history, English, anthropology, comparative literature and so on, is strategic to the current upsurge in Black feminist scholarship.

What is most important conceptually and analytically in this work is the articulation of multiple oppressions. This polyvocality of multiple social locations is historically missing from analyses of oppression and exploitation in traditional feminism, Black Studies and mainstream academic disciplines. Black feminist thinking is essential to possible paradigm shifts in these fields; for example, in Black Studies to begin explaining the African-American experience through the multiple articulations of race, class and gender changes the whole terrain of academic discourse in that area. Black feminist social scientists deconstruct existing frameworks in sociology, history and a range of other disciplines.

In the ensuing discussion I look more carefully at how Black feminist theorizing is central to our rethinking the African-American experience. I examine Black women’s labor and African-American class formation to illustrate how race, class and gender in intersection contribute to our understanding of African-American life. I organize the chapter around the following three themes: (1) an examination of the context of recent Black feminist theorizing in the social sciences; (2) a closer analysis of a major proposition of Black feminist thought, “the simultaneity of oppression,” given race, class and gender as categories of analyses in the social sciences; and (3) sketching out a reconstructed analysis of Black women’s labor and African-American class formation through the lenses of race and gender.

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF RECENT BLACK FEMINIST THEORIZING

The theory and practice of Black feminism predates the current period. Even during the first wave of feminism, according to Terborg-Penn (1990), prominent Black feminists combined the fight against sexism with the fight against racism by continuously calling the public’s attention to these issues. Turn-of-the-century Black activist Anna Julia Cooper conceived the African-American woman’s position thus:

She is confronted by a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both.

(A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, 1892)

Although early-twentieth-century Black suffragettes saw women’s rights as essential to relieving social ills, they repeatedly called attention to issues of race. Nonetheless, within the vise of race, African-American women forged a feminist consciousness in the USA. Such women might be called the original Black feminists. Again, the life and work of Anna Julia Cooper is a case in point. Guy-Sheftall and Bell-Scott (1989:206) point out that Cooper’s work, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892), “has the distinction of being the first scholarly publication in the area of Black women’s studies, though the concept had certainly not emerged during the period.”

Yet the gateway to the new Black feminist scholarship of the past twenty years is the civil rights movement and the mainstream feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. E. Frances White, an activist in the civil rights movement, captures the recent historical context in which contemporary Black feminists are located. She says:

I remember refusing to leave the discussion at a regional black student society meeting to go help out in the kitchen. The process of alienation from those militant and articulate men had begun for me.

(1984:9)

White goes on to point out that:

many of today’s most articulate spokeswomen, too, participated in the black student, civil rights, and black nationalist movements. Like their white counterparts, these women felt frustrated by restraints imposed on them by the men with whom they shared the political arena.

(1984:9)

For Cynthia Washington, an activist in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), this incipient Black feminism is given a different slant. She points out that although Black women’s abilities and skills were recognized in the movement, the men categorized the women as something other than female (Echols, 1989). Both these positions reflect the historic path of Black feminist development in the second wave of US feminism. White and Washington’s interpretations of the movement point to the multiple consciousness which informs Black feminist thinking and struggles. Black feminism is defined as a multiple level engagement (King, 1988).

This is strikingly exemplified by the Combahee River Collective. The organization was formed by a group of Black lesbian feminists in the mid-1970s. In the context of murder in Boston, Barbara Smith and a group of other Black women founded the collective. Smith was insistent that the murder of Black women was not only a racial issue. The fact that thirteen Black women were killed cruelly exhibited how sexism and racism intersected in the lives of African-American women. Given this, the collective argued:

The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of an integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that major systems of oppression create the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.

(Smith, 1983:272)

Importantly, Black feminist theorizing places African-American women at the center of the analyses (Hull et al., 1982; Collins, 1986, 1990; King, 1988; Dill, 1979). By theorizing from the cultural experiences of African- American women, social scientists such as Collins argue epistemologically that experience is crucial to Black women’s ways of knowing and being in the world. Thus capturing that cultural experience is essential to a grounded analysis of African-American women’s lives. This means analysis predicated on the everyday lives of African-American women. More difficult has been linking the everyday to the structural constraints of institutions and political economy (Brewer, 1983, 1989). Indeed, a challenge to Black feminist theory is explicating the interplay between agency and social structure. However, nearly all the recent writing has been about everyday lived experiences. Less successful and visible is the explication of the interrelationship between lives and social structure.

Finally, running through Black feminist analyses is the principle of “the simultaneity of oppression” (Hull et al., 1982). This is the conceptual underpinning of much of recent Black feminist reconceptualization of African-American life. In the following discussion, “the simultaneity of oppression” is examined more carefully and is central to our understanding of Black women’s labor and African-American class formation. Furthermore rethinking the social structure of inequality in the context of race, class and gender intersections is crucial to this discussion, using Black women’s textile industry work in North Carolina as a case in point.

RACE, CLASS AND GENDER: “THE SIMULTANEITY OF OPPRESSION”

The conceptual anchor of recent Black feminist theorizing is the understanding of race, class and gender as simultaneous forces. The major propositions of such a stance include:

1. critiquing dichotomous oppositional thinking by employing both/and rather than either/or categorizations
2. allowing for the simultaneity of oppression and struggle, thus
3. eschewing additive analyses: race+class 4+gender
4. which leads to an understanding of the embeddedness and relationality of race, class and gender and the multiplicative nature of these relationships: race×class×gender
5. reconstructing the lived experiences, historical positioning, cultural perceptions and social construction of Black women who are enmeshed in and whose ideas emerge out of that experience, and
6. developing a feminism rooted in class, culture, gender and race in interaction as its organizing principle.

Importantly, the theorizing about race, class and gender is historicized and contextualized.

RACE, CLASS AND GENDER: AS CATEGORIES OF ANALYSIS

Race has been defined in a number of ways, yet a few powerful conceptualizations are useful to our discussion of Black feminist theory. Recently feminist historian Higginbotham notes:

Like gender and class, then, race must be seen as a social construction predicated upon the recognition of difference and signifying the simultaneous distinguishing and positioning of groups vis-à-vis one another. More than this, race is a highly contested representation of relations of power between social categories by which individuals are identified and identify themselves.

(1992:253)

The embeddedness of gender within the context of race is further captured by Higginbotham. She notes that:

in societies where racial demarcation is endemic to their sociocultural fabric and heritage—to their laws and economy, to their institutionalized structures and discourses, and to their epistemologies and everyday customs—gender identity is inextricably linked to and even determined by racial identity. We are talking about the racialization of gender and class.

(1992:254)

Omi and Winant point out:

The effort must be made to understand race as an unstable and decentered complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle.

(1987:68)

And finally, Barbara Fields conceptualizes race ideologically:

If race lives on today, it does not live on because we have inherited it from our forebears of the seventeenth century or the eighteenth or nineteenth, but because we continue to create it today.

(1970:117)

Relatedly, gender as a category of analysis cannot be understood decontextualized from race and class in Black feminist theorizing. Social constructions of Black womanhood and manhood are inextricably linked to racial hierarchy, meaning systems and institutionalization. Indeed, gender takes on meaning and is embedded institutionally in the context of the racial and class order: productive and social reproductive relations of the economy.

Accordingly, class as an economic relationship expressing productive and reproductive relations is a major category of analysis in the notion of the simultaneity of oppression. Yet recent Black feminist writers (hooks, 1984; Collins, 1990; King, 1988) point out the tendency of theorists writing in the class traditions to reduce race and gender to class. Similarly Black feminist economist Rhonda Williams (1985) places changes in the labor market squarely in a race, gender and class framework that cannot be explained through traditional labor/capital analyses.

Yet we can fall into the trap of overdetermination, especially in the case of race as a category of analysis. In fact, Higginbotham (1992) draws our attention to the metalanguage of race in which internal issues of gender and class are subsumed to a unitarian position of African-Americans. Here, class is hidden or misspecified and gender is rendered invisible in this conceptualization of African-American inequality. Indeed, race in the context of the globalization of capitalism makes gender the center of the new working class. Thus the following discussion draws upon recent Black feminist theorizing to place Black women at the center of an analysis of labor and African-American class formation emphasizing the relational and interactive nature of these social forces.

BLACK WOMEN’S LABOR AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN CLASS FORMATION THROUGH THE PRISM OF RACE, GENDER AND CLASS

The contestation among scholars on race and class reflects conceptual, political interests and careerist concerns. Yet, the debate on the relative importance of race and class has been fought largely on a nongendered terrain. The writings of Black feminist intellectuals give us some new insight into how the race and class might be viewed in the context of gender. Indeed, as theorists explicate the intersection of race, gender and class, our conceptualizations of racial inequality will change. The complexity of race, gender and class interactions suggests that scholarly work must accomplish a number of difficult theoretical tasks especially around interrelationships. Thus, in the context of explaining Black women’s labor and class formation, at least one question is key: How does explicating African- American’s women poorly paid productive or unwaged social reproductive labor recenter our understanding of African-American inequality and class formation? I can begin to answer this question by examining more closely the changes in Black women’s labor, drawing upon the insights of Black feminist theorizing.

Striking is the research on race and labor. Baron (1971), in a classic essay titled “The Demand for Black Labor,” essentially discusses Black men’s labor. This tendency is pervasive in a good deal of the work on the Black experience (Collins, 1986, 1990). Consequently, the inequality of African-American life is conflated with Black men’s inequality. Indeed, much of the discussion of inequality in the USA has been centered on the dynamics of either race or gender which translates into discussions of white women or Black men. Dismissing intersections of race and gender in such autonomous analyses conceptually erases African-American women. Recent Black feminist thinking strongly emphasizes the error in this kind of analysis.

Accordingly, a critical defining element of the current time is the regionalization and internationalization of women’s work. Indeed, a crucial determinant of Black life today is not simply Black men’s marginalization from work but the social transformation of Black women’s labor. Furthermore, the transformation of Black women’s labor is tied to structural changes in the state and economy as well as to shifts in the racial/ gender division of labor.

Three major labor transformations in Black wome...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FOREWORD
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: ON REVISIONING PARADIGMS
• PART II: ON THEORY AND ACTION
• PART III: ON CONTROLLING OUR BODIES
• PART IV: ON THE LANGUAGE OF IDENTITIES
• AFTER/WORDS: “…AND THIS IS WHAT WE’VE DECIDED TO TELL YOU AFTER EVERYTHING W E’VE SHARED…”