Black Feminist Sociology

Perspectives and Praxis

Zakiya Luna, Whitney Pirtle

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000452723
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Scienze sociali
• Categoria: Femminismo e teoria femminista

Black Feminist Sociology offers new writings by established and emerging scholars working in a Black feminist tradition. The book centers Black feminist sociology (BFS) within the sociology canon and widens is to feature Black feminist sociologists both outside the US and the academy. Inspired by a BFS lens, the essays are critical, personal, political and oriented toward social justice. Key themes include the origins of BFS, expositions of BFS orientations to research that extend disciplinary norms, and contradictions of the pleasures and costs of such an approach both academically and personally. Authors explore their own sociological legacy of intellectual development to raise critical questions of intellectual thought and self-reflexivity. The book highlights the dynamism of BFS so future generations of scholars can expand upon and beyond the book's key themes.

Part 1

Revisiting Legacies of Black Feminist Sociology and How They Ground Us

Chapter 1

Black Feminist Sociology

An Interview With Patricia Hill Collins

Patricia Hill Collins

DOI: 10.4324/9781003199113-3

Whitney Pirtle (W. P.): In 1986, you published “Learning from the Outsider- Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought” to argue that Black women are marginalized within academia.¹ Nearly 14 years later, in 2009, you were elected as the first Black woman president of the American Sociological Association, and Black Feminist Thought has over twenty thousand citations. In what ways do you see the marginalization of Black women still manifest in sociology today?

Patricia Hill Collins (P. H. C.): I wrote “Learning from the Outsider Within” because I could not see space for the kinds of arguments that I wanted to make in my own work within sociology as it was then organized. I wanted to create space for Black feminist thought as a discourse, whether it was in sociology or not. The subtitle of the article, “The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” speaks to the substance of my argument. I argue that Black women’s social location both inside and outside academia fosters an important form of knowledge that is important in and of its own right. My analysis explained how the lived experiences of Black women within racism, sexism, and class exploitation, specifically, the journeys of Black domestic workers between their home spaces and the homes of their white employers, created outsider within spaces. From these spaces, Black women cultivated angles of vision on social phenomena that grew from these lived experiences.

The fact that this edited volume on Black feminist sociology exists is evidence that Black women in sociology are no longer marginalized in the same way. But getting here has not been easy and staying here is not guaranteed. Even the best argument is meaningless if it never gets published or ignored because it strays too far from conventional wisdom. In writing “Learning from the Outsider Within,” I had to be mindful of sociological gatekeeping in how I made the then-radical argument that ordinary Black women could think and had something important to say. Strategically, I used sociological tools to make my case in terms that would be recognized within sociology. I certainly aimed to gain legitimacy for Black feminist thought within sociology. But because Black feminist thought is bigger than sociology, my sights were far more ambitious than convincing sociologists. By suggesting that sociology contributed important ideas and methodologies to my approach to Black feminism and that sociology might benefit from attending to Black feminist thought, I hoped to carve out a space within sociology.

But doing sociological work need not be confined within the discipline of sociology. The longstanding exclusion of Black women intellectuals from sociology meant that most Black women intellectuals worked outside sociology across a variety of fields. “Learning from the Outsider Within” spoke to them as well. There is space for my outsider-within argument to travel into political science, anthropology, performance studies and other fields of study. The piece both criticizes sociology for the absence of these arguments and offers a way of remedying that situation. I was not trying to present either myself or Black women as marginalized victims that needed special treatment. That article aimed to create space for Black feminist thought and legitimate Black feminist thought.

W. P.: How do you respond to claims of “racial progress” within the academy and sociology that use your success to back their claims?

P. H. C.: Changing the terms of the debate is the best way to respond to this claim. I know that we should not conflate the success of a few Black women worthies in sociology with the continued oppression of the many Black women who struggle on a daily basis for survival and basic human dignity. Most Black feminist sociologists already know this. It should be clear to us that one biography, in this case, my trajectory in sociology, is no substitute for historical understanding of the bona fide progress of Black women in the sociology as a group as well as the hidden barriers that persist within academia. Clearly these claims rest on assumptions that the system is fair, and all we have to do is work hard enough or have enough talent to excel. What are we not doing when we try and answer this question without first putting forth our own analysis of the problem? And our analysis has to rest on our own research.

We need to research the questions that are important to and for Black women, and that often means doing research that is neither trendy, flashy, nor fun. In 1998, I published a chapter titled “On Race, Gender, and Science: Black Women as Objects and Agents of Sociological Knowledge” in Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice that refutes these claims.² Building on my earlier argument of Black women’s knowledge as an outsider-within perspective, I sketched out a preliminary genealogy of Black women in sociology, naming and emphasizing the important contributions of Black women with doctorates in sociology who preceded me, e.g., Adelaide Cromwell Hill, Cora Bagley Marrett, Jacqueline Johnson Clarke Jackson and Joyce Ladner. I offer a structural argument that traces the trajectory of when Black women were included in sociology as a discipline, the kind of scholarship they produced, and how that inclusion in turn influenced sociology. Though I wrote this chapter twelve years after “Learning from the Outsider Within” was published, this chapter provides the context for my earlier argument. We have to know our history in order to make informed judgments about the present. When it comes to social justice scholarship, there is no one-and-done stance. Deepening analyses takes time, effort, and resources. And it is a collective effort.

I work in the sociology of knowledge, that space between questions of who gets to do intellectual work and what kinds of things they say. This is one reason that I remain so vigilant concerning the theoretical frameworks that are imposed on us that uphold someone else’s agenda, and the kinds of questions that keep us spinning our wheels. Quite frankly, given the small numbers of Black women in sociology when I was an undergraduate and a graduate student ten years later, I look at the numbers of Black women in sociology today as a victory. Yet exclusion is no longer the problem, but rather one of inclusion on whose terms and at what cost. Structural oppression gets at these dynamics. We are sociologists—we have data and we should use it. The treatment of Black women in sociology may be neither equitable nor comfortable, but the arc is trending in the right direction. This is slow, incremental, hard-fought social change, capturing positions one person at a time, and maintaining forward motion. Right now, I’m in the front of the line. I will not always be there.

W. P.: In your ABS remarks, you stated that you felt “smothered in sociology” when you were writing “Learning from the Outsider Within.” When you were being smothered in and by sociology, what did you do for a release?

P. H. C.: That word smothered really stood out for you. At the time of the 2018 ABS session, I was reading Black feminist philosopher Kristie Dotson’s analysis of testimonial smothering as a form of epistemic oppression.³ Her work has been extremely helpful for analyzing what I was experiencing when I wrote “Learning from the Outsider Within.” Dotson is part of a progressive cohort of Black feminist philosophers whose edited volume, Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, has similar goals for philosophy as those for this volume⁴ as well as a broader community of philosophers who study epistemic oppression and epistemic resistance. For Black women, testimonial quieting aims to silence Black women by ignoring, ridiculing, or dismissing what we say. In contrast, testimonial smothering occurs when we remain silent because we anticipate impending testimonial quieting. Testimonial smothering is a form of self-censorship that silences us before we open our mouths to speak. Dotson identifies testimonial quieting and testimonial smothering as silencing strategies that are used to suppress Black women’s authority to testify in our own behalf, create our own self-defined knowledge, and speak for ourselves. In an ideal world, we should not need the approval of others to speak and to have our ideas heard. But we do not live in that world yet and have to figure out how to navigate this one. Epistemic oppression remains powerful, regardless of how we are positioned within sociology or how nicely people now treat us, because it silences us and possibilities for Black feminist thought.

These silencing strategies never go away, no matter how high you rise in sociology. For me, it has been easier to see how other people are trying to silence or “quiet” me that recognizing how I self-censor myself or “smother” my own ideas. Let me give you a recent example. Before I read The Racial Order, I agreed to write a book review of it for a major sociological journal.⁵ The standard framework for a book review is straightforward: identify the author’s goals, evaluate a book based on how well he/she met them, and then offer an informed critique of the argument and evidence. I was more than prepared to write this particular book review, but I just could not bring myself to do it. Within the parameters of established sociology, this book laid out a seemingly innovative new direction for racial theory. But that was exactly the problem. Its fundamental premise violated a tenet of critical race scholarship that we challenge the parameters of disciplinary knowledge, especially the standard sociological theory from which the book took inspiration. In the opening pages of The Racial Order, Emirbayer and Desmond simply ignored the vast critical race scholarship that was produced outside of sociology as not relevant to their argument. Their argument only worked by excluding copious countervailing evidence in other disciplines, the entire field of African American Studies, and the corpus of work by Du Bois as being theoretically unrecognizable to them. The very name of the book summed it up. With hindsight, I see why I never wrote that review. Avoiding the kind of self-censorship (or testimonial smothering) that I would have endured to write the review was an act of self-care.

Dotson’s analysis of the silencing strategies has been helpful to me to explain not just how they worked early in my career (the “Learning from the Outsider Within” phase) but how these strategies suppress the ideas of subordinated people in general. My use of the term smothering in my talk comes from a litany of experiences such as these. To be frank, the work of philosophers on epistemic oppression works has illuminated patterns in my scholarship and that of others. We all smother ourselves to some degree without knowing it. I have yet to find that safe space where I can say, without filters, exactly what I think using the language of my choice to say it. If you read between the lines of my published work, I often offer trenchant criticism of other people’s work, but in coded language that may not read as criticism at all. What I don’t say can speak volumes for those who know the code.

Zakiya Luna (Z. L.): What is the most surprising aspect of being retired that you wish someone had told you when you started on the tenure track?

P. H. C.: Here is the advice that I would give my junior colleagues: The tenure track is an institutional arrangement that disciplines you to fit into existing norms. You are not the same thing as your job. Do not use being on the tenure track as shorthand for being a Black feminist scholar. You have to constantly work at becoming a Black feminist intellectual. That is a lifelong commitment.

I cannot emphasize enough the distinction between my life’s work as intellectual activism and my academic positions within the colleges and universities that have employed me. My life’s work is committed to using the power of ideas as part of a broader social justice struggle. Much of that life’s work is grounded in the experiences of African American women, but t hat work has meant that I had to ask hard quest...