Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  17 Ibid.

  18 “Elizabeth: A Colored Minister of the Gospel,” in Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life, ed. Bert James Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 132. The denomination of Elizabeth is not known to this writer. Her parents were Methodists, but she was separated from her parents at the age of eleven. However, the master from whom she gained her freedom was Presbyterian. Her autobiography was published by the Philadelphia Quakers.

  19 Ibid., 133.

  20 Amanda Berry Smith, An Autobiography: The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Berry Smith, the Colored Evangelist (Chicago, 1893), in Loewenberg and Bogin, Black Women, 157.

  21 Ibid.

  22 Ibid., 159.

  23 The African Methodist Episcopal Church started ordaining women in 1948, according to the Rev. William P. Foley of Bridgestreet A.M.E. Church in Brooklyn, New York. The first ordained woman was Martha J. Keys. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church ordained women as early as 1884. At that time, Mrs. Julia A. Foote was ordained Deacon in the New York Annual Conference. In 1894, Mrs. Mary J. Small was ordained Deacon, and in 1898, she was ordained Elder. See David Henry Bradley, Sr., A History of the A.M.E. Zion Church, vol. 2 1872—1968 (Nashville: Parthenon Press, 1970), 384, 393.The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church enacted legislation to ordain women in the 1970 General Conference. Since then approximately seventy-five women have been ordained. See the Rev. N. Charles Thomas, general secretary of the C.M.E. Church and director of the Department of Ministry, Memphis, Tennessee.

  Many Baptist churches still do not ordain women. Some churches in the Pentecostal tradition do not ordain women. However, in some other Pentecostal churches, women are founders, pastors, elders, and bishops.

  In the case of the A.M.E.Z. Church, where women were ordained as early as 1884, the important question would be, what happened to the women who were ordained? In addition, all of these churches (except for those that do give leadership to women) should answer the following questions: Have women been assigned to pastor “class A” churches? Have women been appointed as presiding elders? (There is currently one woman presiding elder in the A.M.E. Church.) Have women been elected to serve as bishop of any of these churches? Have women served as presidents of conventions?

  24 Yolande Herron, Jacquelyn Grant, Gwendolyn Johnson, and Samuel Robers, “Black Women and the Field Education Experience at Union Theological Seminary: Problems and Prospects” (New York: Union Theological Seminary, May 1978).

  25 This organization continues to call itself the National Conference of Black Churchmen despite the protests of women members.

  26 NCBC has since made the decision to examine the policies of its host institutions (churches) to avoid the recurrence of such incidents.

  27 E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America; C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Church Since Frazier (New York: Schocken Books, 1974).

  28 Printed in Phillip S. Foner, ed., Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press), 51.

  29 Cone, “Black Ecumenism and the Liberation Struggle,” delivered at Yale University, February 16—17, 1978, and Quinn Chapel A.M.E. Church, May 22, 1978. In two other recent papers he has voiced concern on women’s issues, relating them to the larger question of liberation. These papers are: “New Roles in the Ministry: A Theological Appraisal” and “Black Theology and the Black Church: Where Do We Go From Here?”

  30 Jacquelyne Jackson, “But Where Are the Men?” Black Scholar, op. cit., 30.

  31 Ibid., 32.

  32 Kathleen Cleaver was interviewed by Sister Julia Herve. Ibid., 55-56.

  33 Ibid., 55.

  34 Sekou Toure, “The Role of Women in the Revolution,” Black Scholar, vol. 6, no. 6 (March 1975), 32.

  35 Sabelo Newasm and Basil Moore, “The Concept of God in Black Theology,” in The Challenge of Black Theology in South Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta, Ga.: John Knox Press, 1974), 25—26.

  36 Sojourner Truth, “Keeping the Things Going While Things Are Stirring,” printed in Miriam Schneir, ed., Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings (New York: Random House, 1972), 129—30.

  Patricia Hill Collins

  Patricia Hill Collins, professor of Afro-American studies and sociology at the University of Cincinnati, has helped to transform feminist theory with her ground-breaking monograph Black Feminist Thought (1990), which has become one of the most widely used texts in women’s studies curricula. “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought” appeared in Signs 4 (Summer 1989), a major outlet for the publication of black feminist discourse in the late 1970s and 1980s, particularly in sociology. Diane K. Lewis’s “A Response to Inequality: Black Women, Racism, and Sexism (Signs 3, Winter 1977) was the first of these essays to appear in Signs followed by Bonnie Dill’s “The Dialectics of Black Womanhood,” Signs 4 (Spring 1979), 543-55

  THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT

  Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida Wells-Barnett, and Fannie Lou Hamer are but a few names from a growing list of distinguished African American women activists. Although their sustained resistance to black women’s victimization within interlocking systems of race, gender, and class oppression is well known, these women did not act alone.1 Their actions were nurtured by the support of countless, ordinary African American women who, through strategies of everyday resistance, created a powerful foundation for this more visible black feminist activist tradition.2 Such support has been essential to the shape and goals of black feminist thought.

  The long-term and widely shared resistance among African American women can only have been sustained by an enduring and shared standpoint among black women about the meaning of oppression and the actions that black women can and should take to resist it. Efforts to identify the central concepts of this black women’s standpoint figure prominently in the works of contemporary black feminist intellectuals.3 Moreover, political and epistemological issues influence the social construction of black feminist thought. Like other subordinate groups, African American women not only have developed distinctive interpretations of black women’s oppression, but have done so by using alternative ways of producing and validating knowledge itself.

  A BLACK WOMEN’S STANDPOINT

  THE FOUNDATION OF BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT

  Black women’s everyday acts of resistance challenge two prevailing approaches to studying the consciousness of oppressed groups.4 One approach claims that subordinate groups identify with the powerful and have no valid independent interpretation of their own oppression.5 The second approach assumes that the oppressed are less human than their rulers and, therefore, are less capable of articulating their own standpoint.6 Both approaches see any independent consciousness expressed by an oppressed group as being not of the group’s own making and/or inferior to the perspective of the dominant group.7 More important, both interpretations suggest that oppressed groups lack the motivation for political ‘activism because of their flawed consciousness of their own subordination.

  Yet African American women have been neither passive victims of nor willing accomplices to their own domination. As a result, emerging work in black women’s studies contends that black women have a self-defined standpoint on their own oppression.8 Two interlocking components characterize this standpoint. First, black women’s political and economic status provides them with a distinctive set of experiences that offers a different view of material reality than that available to other groups. The unpaid and paid work that black women perform, the types of communities in which they live, and the kinds of relationships they have with others suggest that African American women, as a group, experience a different world than those who are not black and female.9 Second, these experiences stimulate a distinctive black feminist consciousness concerning that material reality. 10 In brief, a subordinate group not only experiences a different reality than a group that rules, but a subordinate group may interpret that reality differently th
an a dominant group.

  Many ordinary African American women have grasped this connection between what one does and how one thinks. Hannah Nelson, an elderly black domestic worker, discusses how work shapes the standpoints of African American and white women: “Since I have to work, I don’t really have to worry about most of the things that most of the white women I have worked for are worrying about. And if these women did their own work, they would think just like I do—about this, anyway.”11 Ruth Shays, a black inner city resident, points out how variations in men’s and women’s experiences lead to differences in perspective: ”The mind of the man and the mind of the woman is the same. But this business of living makes women use their minds in ways that men don’t even have to think about.“12 Finally, elderly domestic worker Rosa Wakefield assesses how the standpoints of the powerful and those who serve them diverge: ”If you eats these dinners and don’t cook ’em, if you wears these clothes and don’t buy or iron them, then you might start thinking that the good fairy or some spirit did all that.... Blackfolks don’t have no time to be thinking like that.... But when you don’t have anything else to do, you can think like that. It’s bad for your mind, though.“13

  While African American women may occupy material positions that stimulate a unique standpoint, expressing an independent black feminist consciousness is problematic precisely because more powerful groups have a vested interest in suppressing such thought. As Hannah Nelson notes, “I have grown to womanhood in a world where the saner you are, the madder you are made to appear.”14 Nelson realizes that those who control the schools, the media, and other cultural institutions are generally skilled in establishing their view of reality as superior to alternative interpretations. While an oppressed group’s experiences may put them in a position to see things differently, their lack of control over the apparatuses of society that sustain ideological hegemony makes the articulation of their self-defined standpoint difficult. Groups unequal in power are correspondingly unequal in their access to the resources necessary to implement their perspectives outside their particular group.

  One key reason that standpoints of oppressed groups are discredited and suppressed by the more powerful is that self-defined standpoints can stimulate oppressed groups to resist their domination. For instance, Annie Adams, a southern black woman, describes how she became involved in civil rights activities.

  When I first went into the mill we had segregated water fountains.... Same thing about the toilets. I had to clean the toilets for the inspection room and then, when I got ready to go to the bathroom, I had to go all the way to the bottom of the stairs to the cellar. So I asked my boss man, “What’s the difference? If I can go in there and clean them toilets, why can’t I use them?” Finally, I started to use that toilet. I decided I wasn’t going to walk a mile to go to the bathroom.15

  In this case, Adams found the standpoint of the “boss man” inadequate, developed one of her own, and acted upon it. In doing so, her actions exemplify the connections between experiencing oppression, developing a self-defined standpoint on that experience, and resistance.

  THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT

  The existence of a distinctive black women’s standpoint does not mean that it has been adequately articulated in black feminist thought. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann provide a useful approach to clarifying the relationship between a black women’s standpoint and black feminist thought with the contention that knowledge exists on two levels.16 The first level includes the everyday, taken-for-granted knowledge shared by members of a given group, such as the ideas expressed by Ruth Shays and Annie Adams. Black feminist thought, by extension, represents a second level of knowledge, the more specialized knowledge furnished by experts who are part of a group and who express the group’s standpoint. The two levels of knowledge are interdependent; while black feminist thought articulates the taken-for-granted knowledge of African American women, it also encourages all black women to create new self-definitions that validate a black women’s standpoint.

  Black feminist thought’s potential significance goes far beyond demonstrating that black women can produce independent, specialized knowledge. Such thought can encourage collective identity by offering black women a different view of themselves and their world than that offered by the established social order. This different view encourages African American women to value their own subjective knowledge base.17 By taking elements and themes of black women’s culture and traditions and infusing them with new meaning, black feminist thought rearticulates a consciousness that already exists.18 More important, this rearticulated consciousness gives African American women another tool of resistance to all forms of their subordination.19

  Black feminist thought, then, specializes in formulating and rearticulating the distinctive, self-defined standpoint of African American women. One approach to learning more about a black women’s standpoint is to consult standard scholarly sources for the ideas of specialists on black women’s experiences.20 But investigating a black women’s standpoint and black feminist thought requires more ingenuity than that required in examining the standpoints and thought of white males. Rearticulating the standpoint of African American women through black feminist thought is much more difficult since one cannot use the same techniques to study the knowledge of the dominated as one uses to study the knowledge of the powerful. This is precisely because subordinate groups have long had to use alternative ways to create an independent consciousness and to rearticulate it through specialists validated by the oppressed themselves.

  THE EUROCENTRIC MASCULINIST KNOWLEDGE-VALIDATION PROCESS21

  All social thought, including white masculinist and black feminist, reflects the interests and standpoint of its creators. As Karl Mannheim notes, “If one were to trace in detail ... the origin and ... diffusion of a certain thought-model, one would discover the affinity it has to the social position of given groups and their manner of interpreting the world.”22 Scholars, publishers, and other experts represent specific interests and credentialing processes and their knowledge claims must satisfy the epistemological and political criteria of the contexts in which they reside.23

  Two political criteria influence the knowledge-validation process. First, knowledge claims must be evaluated by a community of experts whose members represent the standpoints of the groups from which they originate. Second, each community of experts must maintain its credibility as defined by the larger group in which it is situated and from which it draws its basic, taken-for-granted knowledge.

  When white males control the knowledge-validation process, both political criteria can work to suppress black feminist thought. Since the general culture shaping the taken-for-granted knowledge of the community of experts is one permeated by widespread notions of black and female inferiority, 24 new knowledge claims that seem to violate these fundamental assumptions are likely to be viewed as anomalies.25 Moreover, specialized thought challenging notions of black and female inferiority is unlikely to be generated from within a white-male-controlled academic community because both the kinds of questions that could be asked and the explanations that would be found satisfying would necessarily reflect a basic lack of familiarity with black women’s reality.26

  The experiences of African American women scholars illustrate how individuals who wish to rearticulate a black women’s standpoint through black feminist thought can be suppressed by a white-male-controlled knowledge-validation process. Exclusion from basic literacy, quality educational experiences, and faculty and administrative positions has limited black women’s access to influential academic positions.27 Thus, while black women can produce knowledge claims that contest those advanced by the white male community, this community does not grant that black women scholars have competing knowledge claims based in another knowledge-validation process. As a consequence, any credentials controlled by white male academicians can be denied to black women producing black feminist thought on the grounds that it is not credible research. />
  Those black women with academic credentials who seek to exert the authority that their status grants them to propose new knowledge claims about African American women face pressures to use their authority to help legitimate a system that devalues and excludes the majority of black women.28 One way of excluding the majority of black women from the knowledge-validation process is to permit a few black women to acquire positions of authority in institutions that legitimate knowledge and to encourage them to work within the taken-for-granted assumptions of black female inferiority shared by the scholarly community and the culture at large. Those black women who accept these assumptions are likely to be rewarded by their institutions, often at significant personal cost. Those challenging the assumptions run the risk of being ostracized.

  African American women academicians who persist in trying to rearticulate a black women’s standpoint also face potential rejection of their knowledge claims on epistemological grounds. Just as the material realities of the powerful and the dominated produce separate standpoints, each group may also have distinctive epistemologies or theories of knowledge. It is my contention that black female scholars may know that something is true but be unwilling or unable to legitimate their claims using Eurocentric masculinist criteria for consistency with substantiated knowledge and Eurocentric masculinist criteria for methodological adequacy.