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Black Feminism

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Title: Black Feminism


1
Black Feminism
  • in a white supremacist
  • capitalist patriarchy

2
4 themes
  • Black women empower themselves by creating
    self-definitions and self-valuations that enable
    themselves to establish positive, multiple images
    and repel negative, controlling representations
    of Black womanhood
  •  
  • Black women confront and dismantle the
    interlocking and overarching structure of
    domination in terms of race, gender, and class
    oppression
  •  
  • BW intertwine intellectual thought and political
    action (theory and practice or praxis)
  •  
  • BW recognize a distinct cultural heritage that
    gives them the energy and skills to resist and
    overcome daily discrimination.

3
  • Patricia Hill Collins sums it up by saying that
    Black feminism is a process of self-conscious
    struggle that empowers women and men to actualize
    a humanist vision of community.

4
Two Waves of Black Feminism
  • Two waves of Black feminism (Ula Taylor,
    Journal of Black Studies, 1998).
  •  
  • First wave connected to the abolitionist
    movement second to the civil rights movement.

5
  • Between 1830 and 1865, BW abolitionists developed
    a feminist consciousness that reflected their
    particular experiences as BW as well as aspects
    of sexism they shared with white women. Free
    and enslaved AA women created numerous strategies
    and tactics to dismantle slavery as a legal
    institution and resist racially gendered sexual
    abuse.
  •  

6
  • During this period, because of mythical,
    stereotypical images of Black womanhood, free and
    enslaved AA women were blamed for their own
    victimization.
  •  
  • The core of the myth surrounded the Jezebel/Mammy
    dichotomy. Jezebel excused miscegenation and
    the sexual exploitation of Black women. Mammy
    endorsed service of Black women in southern
    households. Like their enslaved sisters, free
    Black women could not escape the harmful effects
    of these myths and as reformers they organized
    against race and gender oppression
    simultaneously.
  •  

7
  • AA female abolitionists feminist consciousness
    blossomed as they campaigned for equal rights
    within the context of organized Black
    abolitionism. Sojourner Truth, 19th century Black
    reformer couched her arguments in evangelical
    language. Truths narrative, Arent I a
    Woman?, highlights a theological justification
    for the abolition of slavery and the granting of
    equal rights for men and women.
  • Slave status denied Black women motherhood,
    protection from exploitation and feminine
    qualities. Truths call empowered Black women by
    bringing attention to the intersection of race
    and gender.
  •  

8
  • After passage of the 13th amendment, tensions
    between abolitionists and feminists exploded over
    the issue of suffrage. Despite the fact that
    white women exploited and betrayed Black women
    during the suffrage movement, Black women
    nevertheless played an important role in the
    fight for womens right to vote, and this in the
    context of the brutal Jim Crow legal racist
    structure.
  •  
  • Black women like Ida B. Wells-Barnett argued that
    Black women needed the vote even more than their
    white counterparts to protect their inalienable
    rights and improve their schools and status as
    wage-laborers.
  •  

9
  • Wells-Barnett challenged the myths that all white
    women were chaste and all Black women were
    without virtue and that all Black men were
    rapists, by unleashing a massive international
    campaign against lynching. She documented the
    economic conditions of the lynching victims, and
    that white women could be attracted to Black men
    and that Black women were being violated and
    abused at alarming rates.

10
  • After passage of the 19th amendment, Black women
    tried to cast their votes but were met with
    hostility not only at the polls in states like
    Georgia, Mississippi, and Florida, but at the
    National Womens Party Convention in 1921. 60 AA
    women from 14 states requested an interview with
    Alice Paul, leader of the NWP, to discuss the
    disenfranchisement of Black Women. Paul agreed
    to listen but did not accept their request to
    present their plea to the convention.
    Journalists for the magazine the Nation (still in
    existence) revealed that AA women sought to have
    Paul form a special committee to investigate the
    violations during the 1920 election, but that
    Paul was indifferent to and resentful of the AA
    delegation. Paul and other white leaders
    repeatedly explained that Black women were no
    worse off than Black men in these states.
    (Florida in the 2000 election needs to be viewed
    historically).

11
The Second Wave
  •  During the Civil rights era, usually demarcated
    by the Brown vs. Board decision in 1954, many of
    the leaders were men, certainly the most visible
    ones in the mainstream media, nevertheless BW
    were extremely important at the forefront and on
    the ground.
  •  
  • Ella Baker, Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson, Septima
    Clark, JoAnn Robinson, Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria
    Gray-Adams, Rosa Parks, Assata Shakur, Kathleen
    Cleaver, Angela Davis, Elaine Brown (just to name
    a few of the most well-known), dedicated
    themselves to civil rights and Black power as
    well as equality for men and women.

12
  • Ella Baker led the non-violent direct tactics of
    the SNCC sit-ins, boycotts, and freedom rides,
    and it is well-known that the civil rights
    movement served as a model for the womens
    movement. JoAnn Robinson and the Womens
    Political Council organized the Montgomery Bus
    Boycott that catapulted Martin Luther King, Jr.
    onto the National stage. (see The Montgomery Bus
    Boycott and the Women Who Started It, by JoAnn
    Robinson). Also, the Rosa Parks Myth, that she
    was a tired seamstress who was so tired after
    work one day that she refused to move and then
    MLK led the boycott, etc. Rosa Parks was a
    longtime activist, member and leader of the NAACP
    and many other organizations. It was planned
    civil disobedience and she was tired but not
    only or even primarily physically tired from
    work, but tired in the sense of fed-up with
    racism, and not simply the separation of public
    facilities, but the institutional subjugation of
    AA peoples.
  •  
  • The Civil rights movement served as a training
    ground for Black women who would lead the second
    wave of feminism, the womens liberation movement.

13
  • But Black women were also beginning to challenge
    the male-centeredness of the Civil rights
    organizations, where Black women fully
    participated in and led the boycotts, sit-ins,
    Freedom Summer, March on Washington, and other
    important campaigns, yet back at the office they
    did housework, typed, cooked, and when the media
    called, the men were put in front.
  •  
  • There were also complicated personal/political
    struggles going on, and relationships between
    Black men and white women during the movement
    became politicized.
  •  
  •  

14
  • In 1966, Betty Freidan and two Black women,
    Aileen Hernandez and Pauli Murray, along with a
    group of prominent professional women, founded
    the National Organization of Women. This was in
    part a response to the feeling of many Black and
    White women that what was need was an NAACP for
    Women.
  •  
  • But NOW was flooded with younger white women who
    were refugees of the much more (compared to SNCC,
    e.g.) sexist, patriarchal New Left political
    organizations such as the SDS, and so like their
    foremothers, the second wave of feminists forged
    their feminism in the anti-racist struggle, but
    ultimately abandoned this struggle to form
    organizations that catered to the needs and
    concerns of white middle and upper middle class
    women.

15
  • African American women did not have the privilege
    of abandoning the anti-racist struggle. As AA
    struggled against the backlash brought on by the
    passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the
    Black Power movement emerged. This shift in the
    movement toward a nationalist trend had a
    profound impact on Black feminists.
  •  
  • On the one hand, nationalism has a vision that
    includes women, for no nation can survive without
    women, and it recognizes that women too suffer
    under colonialism and racism, but on the other
    hand women again often found themselves in
    secondary roles and used as symbols by their male
    counterparts.

16
  • Assata Shakur and Elaine Brown paint two very
    different pictures of the role of women in the
    Black Panther party. Shakur shows that women
    were the real basis of the community programs
    like the free breakfast program, but Brown
    details physical abuse and sexist power plays
    between men and women.
  •  
  • But men and women worked side by side in
    successful campaigns such as the election of
    Shirley Chisholm as the first Black woman in
    Congress.
  •  
  • Women began organizing on their own and many of
    the most successful campaigns were led by women,
    including the creation of the Black Womens
    Liberation Committee, later renamed the Third
    World Womens Alliance under Frances Beal.

17
  • Beals 1970 essay Double Jeopardy To be Black
    and Female was an important moment in the
    development of Contemporary Black Feminism, but
    her work went beyond theory, exemplifying one of
    the core characteristics of BF highlighted by
    Collins.
  • The TWWA participated in the Liberation Day
    parade celebrating the 19th amendment on August
    26, 1970. White and Black women clashed over
    support for Angela Davis, the whites saying that
    Angela Davis has nothing to do with the womens
    struggle and the Black women saying she may have
    nothing to with your struggle but she certainly
    does ours.
  •  
  • Beal stated that any womens struggle that is not
    anti-racist and anti-imperialist has nothing in
    common with the Black womens struggle. 

18
  • Another point of conflict between white and Black
    women in the womens movement had to do with the
    emerging anti-poverty movement and welfare
    movement. The National Welfare Rights
    Organization was founded in 1967, though earlier
    regional groups had been formed earlier.
  •  
  • Again, many of the white middle class women in
    the womens movement did not see the importance
    of the anti-poverty and welfare rights movements,
    concentrating instead on womens place in the
    professions, glass ceilings and
    under-representation in fields such as law,
    medicine, academia, and the corporate office.
  • Black feminists responded that it is not just a
    matter of sex discrimination in white collar
    employment but poverty elimination.

19
  • 1973 saw the formation of the National Black
    Feminist Organization. It had a successful
    conference in November of 1973 but had difficulty
    sustaining momentum in part because most Black
    women did not have the luxury of devoting
    full-time to a political movement. Again, the
    class issue came in, as an important issue
    between Black and white female activists. As
    Toni Morrison wrote during this period
  •  
  • It is a source of amusement even now to Black
    women to listen to feminists talk of liberation,
    while back at home somebodys nice Black
    grandmother shoulders the daily responsibility of
    child rearing and floor mopping and the liberated
    one comes home to examine the housekeeping,
    correct it, and be entertained by the children.
    If womens liberation needs those grandmothers to
    thrive, it has a serious flaw.

20
  • The late 70s saw the creation of Black feminist
    groups like the Combahee River Collective,
    issuing important statements that stressed their
    commitment to dismantling the interlocking
    structures of race/class/gender oppressions.
  • The 80s and 90s saw the emergence of new
    contemporary Black feminist theory and practice,
    especially with the development of liberatory and
    emancipatory theoretical frameworks dealing with
    epistemological issues. bell hooks, e.g. But
    these cutting edge Black feminists also take us
    back to the important history of the movement and
    the foremothers who led the way, and without
    which they would not be here to speak. Still,
    many argue that we have entered the Third Wave of
    Black feminism.
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