BLACK FEMINISM/AFRICANA WOMANISM Two Arms/1 Body

Objectives  Discuss the tenets of Feminism  Describe how white feminism has been exclusionary toward Black women  Compare and contrast Africana Womanism and Black Feminism  Consider how to turn awareness into agency

Africana Womanism  In the American experience the feminist movement had effectively displaced Black unity, whether in the context of the Abolitionist movement, the right to vote movement or the civil rights movement. And so we sit idly by and let whites turn Harriet Tuman and Rosa Parks into supporters for White feminism as opposed to race defenders. Iva E. Carruthers.

Black Feminism  Emerged in the 1970s  Offshoot of white feminism  Embraced by many Black women

Many Black Women  Have outright rejected feminism  Consider adoption incompatible with the needs of the community  Reject feminism on the premise that the sole focus on Black women’s interests undermine community needs.

Terminology  Orders priorities  Accepts historical context  Frames practice

White Feminism  Historically led by white middle-class women  Has a racially exclusive legacy  Places all women’s history under a universal umbrella

Excludes non-White Contributions  Harriet Tubman  Sojoiner Truth  Ida B. Wells-Barnett  Rosa Parks

Nomo  African philosophy of naming  Self-definition creates the limits and direction of any concept  Female is very narrow in definition  Only women can be called women by definition  Africana as a descriptor creates specificity

Africana Womanism  Centered around family/community  Recognizes sexual politics  Contextualizes the historical context of Black women’s positionality  Does not recognize the male counterpart as a the primary enemy to her progress

Africana Womanism Perspective  Eliminate the ways in which racism shapes the experience of the Black Community  The impact of sexism is subsidiary to racism  The wage gap between Black and white women is reflective of that.  Reflects the needs of Black women, rather than the needs of the white middle class  Ultimately, gender discrimination affects everyone.

Wage Gap by Gender and Race

Black Feminist Thought  By stressing how African-American women must become self-defined and self-determining within intersecting oppressions, Black feminist thought emphasizes the importance of knowledge for empowerment. Ideas matter, but doing “plenty of work” may matter even more. Historically, U.S. Black women’s activism demonstrates that becoming empowered requires more than changing the consciousness of individual Black women via Black community development strategies. Empowerment also requires transforming unjust social institutions that African-Americans encounter from one generation to the next.

Contributions  Intersectionality creates a fundamental paradigmatic shift in how we think about unjust power-relations  That understanding can also be sued to frame agency towards resistance  Black Feminist thought creates a framework to address epistemological perspectives that validate oppressive conditions.  Criticizing prevailing knowledge helps to create self-definitions and define own terms

Power and Empowerment  Understand the dialectical relationship between oppression and activism  This visualizes change as a result of agency  Understand terms for interest convergence   Use understanding to formulate strategy and iterative processes.

Structural Domain of Power  Power cannot accrue without the transformation of American institutions  This has historically happened very grudgingly  Change has also been the cause of oppressive uprisings  Class action lawsuits and executive orders have changed the power-dynamic  However, that change is limited to enforcement and the “interpretation of the law”

Possessive Investment of Power  Power is protected  Popular system of commonsense perpetuate ideas of who is eligible to wield power  Borders are policed through logical systems and “legal” practices  Black women are expected to submit to all men and are seen as insubordinate otherwise  Asians and other members of underprivileged groups are encouraged to devalue the labor and contributions of Blacks

Outsider Within  Black women are under surveillance within white institutions  Black women have the power to keep institutions themselves under surveillance  Black women also have the ability to “work the cracks” of the egg.

Aint I Woman?

Vision  Go beyond permanent oppressors and perpetual victims  Use the shifting categories within a matrix of domination to stimulate empowerment  Minimize oppression at the intersection of objective and subjective violence  Utilize knowledge (counter-narrative) to position awareness to frame change initiatives