Words of Fire
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For any particular interpretive context, new knowledge claims must be consistent with an existing body of knowledge that the group controlling the interpretive context accepts as true. The methods used to validate knowledge claims must also be acceptable to the group controlling the knowledge-validation process.
The criteria for the methodological adequacy of positivism illustrate the epistemological standards that black women scholars would have to satisfy in legitimating alternative knowledge claims.29 Positivist approaches aim to create scientific descriptions of reality by producing objective generalizations. Since researchers have widely differing values, experiences, and emotions, genuine science is thought to be unattainable unless all human characteristics except rationality are eliminated from the research process. By following strict methodological rules, scientists aim to distance themselves from the values, vested interests, and emotions generated by their class, race, sex, or unique situation and in so doing become detached observers and manipulators of nature.30
Several requirements typify positivist methodological approaches. First, research methods generally require a distancing of the researcher from her/ his “object” of study by defining the researcher as a “subject” with full human subjectivity and objectifying the “object” of study.31 A second requirement is the absence of emotions from the research process.32 Third, ethics and values are deemed inappropriate in the research process, either as the reason for scientific inquiry or as part of the research process itself.33 Finally, adversarial debates, whether written or oral, become the preferred method of ascertaining truth—the arguments that can withstand the greatest assault and survive intact become the strongest truths.34
Such criteria ask African American women to objectify themselves, devalue their emotional life, displace their motivations for furthering knowledge about black women, and confront, in an adversarial relationship, those who have more social, economic, and professional power than they. It seems unlikely, therefore, that black women would use a positivist epistemological stance in rearticulating a black women’s standpoint. Black women are more likely to choose an alternative epistemology for assessing knowledge claims, one using standards that are consistent with black women’s criteria for substantiated knowledge and with black women’s criteria for methodological adequacy. If such an epistemology exists, what are its contours? Moreover, what is its role in the production of black feminist thought?
THE CONTOURS OF AN AFROCENTRIC FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY
Africanist analyses of the black experience generally agree on the fundamental elements of an Afrocentric standpoint. In spite of varying histories, black societies reflect elements of a core African value system that existed prior to and independently of racial oppression.35 Moreover, as a result of colonialism, imperialism, slavery, apartheid, and other systems of racial domination, blacks share a common experience of oppression. These similarities in material conditions have fostered shared Afrocentric values that permeate the family structure, religious institutions, culture, and community life of blacks in varying parts of Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and North America.36 This Afrocentric consciousness permeates the shared history of people of African descent through the framework of a distinctive Afrocentric epistemology.37
Feminist scholars advance a similar argument. They assert that women share a history of patriarchal oppression through the political economy of the material conditions of sexuality and reproduction.38 These shared material conditions are thought to transcend divisions among women created by race, social class, religion, sexual orientation, and ethnicity and to form the basis of a women’s standpoint with its corresponding feminist consciousness and epistemology.39
Since black women have access to both the Afrocentric and the feminist standpoints, an alternative epistemology used to rearticulate a black women’s standpoint reflects elements of both traditions.40 The search for the distinguishing features of an alternative epistemology used by African American women reveals that values and ideas that Africanist scholars identify as being characteristically “black” often bear remarkable resemblance to similar ideas claimed by feminist scholars as being characteristically “female.”41 This similarity suggests that the material conditions of oppression can vary dramatically and yet generate some uniformity in the epistemologies of subordinate groups. Thus, the significance of an Afrocentric feminist epistemology may lie in its enrichment of our understanding of how subordinate groups create knowledge that enables them to resist oppression.
The parallels between the two conceptual schemes raise a question: Is the worldview of women of African descent more intensely infused with the overlapping feminine/Afrocentric standpoints than is the case for either African American men or white women?42 While an Afrocentric feminist epistemology, reflects elements of epistemologies used by blacks as a group and women as a group, it also paradoxically demonstrates features that may be unique to black women. On certain dimensions, black women may more closely resemble black men, on others, white women, and on still others, black women may stand apart from both groups. Black feminist sociologist Deborah K. King describes this phenomenon as a “both/or” orientation, the act of being simultaneously a member of a group and yet standing apart from it. She suggests that multiple realities among black women yield a “multiple consciousness in black women’s politics” and that this state of belonging yet not belonging forms an integral part of black women’s oppositional consciousness.43 Bonnie Thornton Dill’s analysis of how black women live with contradictions, a situation she labels the “dialectics of black womanhood,” parallels King’s assertions that this “both/or” orientation is central to an Afrocentric feminist consciousness.44 Rather than emphasizing how a black women’s standpoint and its accompanying epistemology are different from those in Afrocentric and feminist analyses, I use black women’s experiences as a point of contact between the two.
Viewing an Afrocentric feminist epistemology in this way challenges analyses claiming that black women have a more accurate view of oppression than do other groups. Such approaches suggest that oppression can be quantified and compared and that adding layers of oppression produces a potentially clearer standpoint. While it is tempting to claim that black women are more oppressed than everyone else and therefore have the best standpoint from which to understand the mechanisms, processes, and effects of oppression, this simply may not be the case.45
African American women do not uniformly share an Afrocentric feminist epistemology since social class introduces variations among black women in seeing, valuing, and using Afrocentric feminist perspectives. While a black women’s standpoint and its accompanying epistemology stem from black women’s consciousness of race and gender oppression, they are not simply the result of combining Afrocentric and female values —standpoints are rooted in real material conditions structured by social class.46
CONCRETE EXPERIENCE AS A CRITERION OF MEANING
Carolyn Chase, a thirty-one-year-old inner city black woman, notes, “My aunt used to say, ‘A heap see, but a few know.’ ”47 This saying depicts two types of knowing, knowledge and wisdom, and taps the first dimension of an Afrocentric feminist epistemology. Living life as black women requires wisdom since knowledge about the dynamics of race, gender, and class subordination has been essential to black women’s survival. African American women give such wisdom high credence in assessing knowledge.
Allusions to these two types of knowing pervade the words of a range of African American women. In explaining the tenacity of racism, Zilpha Elaw, a preacher of the mid-1800s, noted: “The pride of a white skin is a bauble of great value with many in some parts of the United States, who readily sacrifice their intelligence to their prejudices, and possess more knowledge than wisdom.”48 In describing differences separating African American and white women, Nancy White invokes a similar rule: “When you come right down to it, white women just think they are free. Black women know they ain’t free.”49 Geneva Smitherman, a college profess
or specializing in African American linguistics, suggests that “from a black perspective, written documents are limited in what they can teach about life and survival in the world. Blacks are quick to ridicule ‘educated fools,’ ... they have ‘book learning,’ but no ‘mother wit,’ knowledge, but not wisdom.”50 Mabel Lincoln eloquently summarizes the distinction between knowledge and wisdom: “To black people like me, a fool is funny—you know, people who love to break bad, people you can’t tell anything to, folks that would take a shotgun to a roach.”51
Black women need wisdom to know how to deal with the “educated fools” who would “take a shotgun to a roach.” As members of a subordinate group, black women cannot afford to be fools of any type, for their devalued status denies them the protections that white skin, maleness, and wealth confer. This distinction between knowledge and wisdom, and the use of experience as the cutting edge dividing them, has been key to black women’s survival. In the context of race, gender, and class oppression, the distinction is essential since knowledge without wisdom is adequate for the powerful, but wisdom is essential to the survival of the subordinate.
For ordinary African American women, those individuals who have lived through the experiences about which they claim to be experts are more believable and credible than those who have merely read or thought about such experiences. Thus, concrete experience as a criterion for credibility frequently is invoked by black women when making knowledge claims. For instance, Hannah Nelson describes the importance that personal experience has for her: “Our speech is most directly personal, and every black person assumes that every other black person has a right to a personal opinion. In speaking of grave matters, your personal experience is considered very good evidence. With us, distant statistics are certainly not as important as the actual experience of a sober person.”52 Similarly, Ruth Shays uses her concrete experiences to challenge the idea that formal education is the only route to knowledge: “I am the kind of person who doesn’t have a lot of education, but both my mother and my father had good common sense. Now, I think that’s all you need. I might not know how to use thirty-four words where three would do, but that does not mean that I don’t know what I’m talking about . . . I know what I’m talking about because I’m talking about myself. I’m talking about what I have lived.”53 Implicit in Shays’s self-assessment is a critique of the type of knowledge that obscures the truth, the “thirty-four words” that cover up a truth that can be expressed in three.
Even after substantial mastery of white masculinist epistemologies, many black women scholars invoke their own concrete experiences and those of other black women in selecting topics for investigation and methodologies used. For example, Elsa Barkley Brown subtitles her essay on black women’s history, “how my mother taught me to be a historian in spite of my academic training.”54 Similarly, Joyce Ladner maintains that growing up as a black woman in the South gave her special insights in conducting her study of black adolescent women.55
Henry Mitchell and Nicholas Lewter claim that experience as a criterion of meaning with practical images as its symbolic vehicles is a fundamental epistemological tenet in African American thought-systems.56 Stories, narratives, and Bible principles are selected for their applicability to the lived experiences of African Americans and become symbolic representations of a whole wealth of experience. For example, Bible tales are told for their value to common life, so their interpretation involves no need for scientific historical verification. The narrative method requires that the story be “told, not torn apart in analysis, and trusted as core belief, not admired as science.”57 Any biblical story contains more than characters and a ptot—it presents key ethical issues salient in African American life.
June Jordan’s essay about her mother’s suicide exemplifies the multiple levels of meaning that can occur when concrete experiences are used as a criterion of meaning. Jordan describes her mother, a woman who literally died trying to stand up, and the effect that her mother’s death had on her own work:I think all of this is really about women and work. Certainly this is all about me as a woman and my life work. I mean I am not sure my mother’s suicide was something extraordinary. Perhaps most women must deal with a similar inheritance, the legacy of a woman whose death you cannot possibly pinpoint because she died so many, many times and because, even before she became your mother, the life of that woman was taken.... I came too late to help my mother to her feet. By way of everlasting thanks to all of the women who have helped me to stay alive, I am working never to be late again.58
While Jordan has knowledge about the concrete act of her mother’s death, she also strives for wisdom concerning the meaning of that death.
Some feminist scholars offer a similar claim that women, as a group, are more likely than men to use concrete knowledge in assessing knowledge claims. For example, a substantial number of the 135 women in a study of women’s cognitive development were “connected knowers” and were drawn to the sort of knowledge that emerges from firsthand observation. Such women felt that since knowledge comes from experience, the best way of understanding another person’s ideas was to try to share the experiences that led the person to form those ideas. At the heart of the procedures used by connected knowers is the capacity for empathy.59
In valuing the concrete, African American women may be invoking not only an Afrocentric tradition, but a women’s tradition as well. Some feminist theorists suggest that women are socialized in complex relational nexuses where contextual rules take priority over abstract principles in governing behavior. This socialization process is thought to stimulate characteristic ways of knowing.60 For example, Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith maintains that two modes of knowing exist, one located in the body and the space it occupies and the other passing beyond it. She asserts that women, through their child-rearing and nurturing activities, mediate these two modes and use the concrete experiences of their daily lives to assess more abstract knowledge claims.61
Amanda King, a young black mother, describes how she used the concrete to assess the abstract and points out how difficult mediating these two modes of knowing can be:The leaders of the ROC [a labor union] lost their jobs too, but it just seemed like they were used to losing their jobs.... This was like a lifelong thing for them, to get out there and protest. They were like, what do you call them—intellectuals.... You got the ones that go to the university that are supposed to make all the speeches, they’re the ones that are supposed to lead, you know, put this little revolution together, and then you got the little ones ... that go to the factory everyday, they be the ones that have to fight. I had a child, and I thought I don’t have the time to be running around with these people.... I mean I understand some of that stuff they were talking about, like the bourgeoisie, the rich and the poor and all that, but I had surviving on my mind for me and my kid.62
For King, abstract ideals of class solidarity were mediated by the concrete experience of motherhood and the connectedness it involved.
In traditional African American communities, black women find considerable institutional support for valuing concrete experience. Black extended families and black churches are two key institutions where black women experts with concrete knowledge of what it takes to be self-defined black women share their knowledge with their younger, less experienced sisters. This relationship of sisterhood among black women can be seen as a model for a whole series of relationships that African American women have with each other, whether it is networks among women in extended families, among women in the black church, or among women in the African American community at large.63
Since the black church and the black family are both woman-centered and Afrocentric institutions, African American women traditionally have found considerable institutional support for this dimension of an Afrocentric feminist epistemology in ways that are unique to them. While white women may value the concrete, it is questionable whether white families, particularly middle-class nuclear ones, and white community institution
s provide comparable types of support. Similarly, while black men are supported by Afrocentric institutions, they cannot participate in black women’s sisterhood. In terms of black women’s relationships with one another then, African American women may indeed find it easier than others to recognize connectedness as a primary way of knowing, simply because they are encouraged to do so by black women’s tradition of sisterhood.
EPISTEMOLOGY AND BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT
Living life as an African American woman is a necessary prerequisite for producing black feminist thought because within black women’s communities thought is validated and produced with reference to a particular set of historical, material, and epistemological conditions.64 African American women who adhere to the idea that claims about black women must be substantiated by black women’s sense of their own experiences, and who anchor their knowledge claims in an Afrocentric feminist epistemology, have produced a rich tradition of black feminist thought.
Traditionally, such women were blues singers, poets, autobiographers, storytellers, and orators validated by the larger community of black women as experts on a black women’s standpoint. Only a few unusual African American feminist scholars have been able to defy Eurocentric masculinist epistemologies and explicitly embrace an Afrocentric feminist epistemology. Consider Alice Walker’s description of Zora Neale Hurston: “In my mind, Zora Neale Hurston, Billie Holiday, and Bessie Smith form a sort of unholy trinity. Zora belongs in the tradition of black women singers, rather than among ‘the literati.’ ... Like Billie and Bessie she followed her own road, believed in her own gods, pursued her own dreams, and refused to separate herself from ‘common’ people.”65