Rightful Place: Centering Black Womanhood in Black Political Culture and Black Liberation Politics (excerpted)
In my teaching I address the fact that visibility is important to removing race and gender blind spots and correcting deficits in consciousness that show up in our political culture and behavior. Black women’s experiences face erasure from inside and outside of their own communities. In Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1990), another text that I assign, Michelle Wallace leveled criticism at her previous analysis, realizing that minimizing the contributions of women was a rule, and not a variance in nationalist movements. I would go further to state that devaluing the contributions of women comes automatically to humans in most of the world.
Intersectional invisibility dates back decades though, and to make my students aware of this, we read, “Ain’t I a woman?” (1851), in which Sojourner Truth detailed the slights in her address delivered at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio. She said,
Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman. I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman? Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ‘cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him (para. 2-3).
For the enslaved, visibility was a means to full citizenship, but women were largely denied that visibility. Enslaved women like Sojourner Truth did the same work, took the same beatings, bore the children, but simply were not as valuable or valued as men, both literally and figuratively. Black women by no means received the same reverence patriarchy reserved for white women, who were also devalued. Sojourner Truth, Fannie Lou Hamer, and scores of other Black women were giants of American political culture and Black American liberation, but I’ve never seen those images enshrined on the wall of a Black barbecue joint. Visibility mattered in the past, and it matters now.
In terms of feminist and antiracist theory, the struggle for acknowledgement, visibility, respect, and empathy continues. Crenshaw further notes that:
Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure….Thus, for feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse to embrace the experiences and concerns of Black women, the entire framework that has been used as a basis for translating "women's experience" or "the Black experience" into concrete policy demands must be rethought and recast. (p. 140)
My students, just like most academics, activists, and advocates, need more stories from which to view and study society. Traditional frameworks that privilege patriarchal and white supremacist standards are insufficient to do this work. Recasting frameworks so that they translate our experiences into useful policy will require a visibility that Black women can provide through narrative, such as the stories contained within this volume. Crenshaw (1991) notes in “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” that
The problem is not simply that both discourses fail women of color by not acknowledging the "additional" burden of patriarchy or of racism, but that the discourses are often inadequate even to the discrete tasks of articulating the full dimensions of racism and sexism. Because women of color experience racism in ways not always the same as those experienced by men of color, and sexism in ways not always parallel to experiences of white women, dominant conceptions of antiracism and feminism are limited, even on their own terms. (p. 1252)
Since Black women’s experiences differ from the experiences of Black men and of white women, our unique narratives are largely lost in translation. Patriarchy and racism work together to form a veil of misperception that shrouds our motivations and successes so that even when we are excelling and/or leading, we are not perceived as leaders.
A theme that my teaching addresses is to remind students that Black women have commanded our communities for generations. We lead communities and families by choice and out of necessity, but that distinction has little utility without the context of racial and gender issues. When bills are due and work beckons, neither requires knowledge of why one seeks to provide for herself or her family. And yet, the biases we endure confer a harsher admonishment for our mistakes, and higher barriers to our achievement.
