Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  Zora Neale Hurston is an exception for, prior to 1950, few black women earned advanced degrees, and most of those who did complied with Eurocentric masculinist epistemologies. While these women worked on behalf of black women, they did so within the confines of pervasive race and gender oppression. Black women scholars were in a position to see the exclusion of black women from scholarly discourse, and the thematic content of their work often reflected their interest in examining a black women’s standpoint. However, their tenuous status in academic institutions led them to adhere to Eurocentric masculinist epistemologies so that their work would be accepted as scholarly. As a result, while they produced black feminist thought, those black women most likely to gain academic credentials were often least likely to produce black feminist thought that used an Afrocentric feminist epistemology.

  As more black women earn advanced degrees, the range of black feminist scholarship is expanding. Increasing numbers of African American women scholars are explicitly choosing to ground their work in black women’s experiences, and, by doing so, many implicitly adhere to an Afrocentric feminist epistemology. Rather than being restrained by their “both/ and” status of marginality, these women make creative use of their outsider-within status and produce innovative black feminist thought. The difficulties these women face lie less in demonstrating the technical components of white male epistemologies than in resisting the hegemonic nature of these patterns of thought in order to see, value, and use existing alternative Afrocentric feminist ways of knowing.

  In establishing the legitimacy of their knowledge claims, black women scholars who want to develop black feminist thought may encounter the often conflicting standards of three key groups. First, black feminist thought must be validated by ordinary African American women who grow to womanhood “in a world where the saner you are, the madder you are made to appear.”66 To be credible in the eyes of this group, scholars must be personal advocates for their material, be accountable for the consequences of their work, have lived or experienced their material in some fashion, and be willing to engage in dialogues about their findings with ordinary, everyday people. Second, if it is to establish its legitimacy, black feminist thought also must be accepted by the community of black women scholars. These scholars place varying amounts of importance on rearticulating a black women’s standpoint using an Afrocentric feminist epistemology. Third, black feminist thought within academia must be prepared to confront Eurocentric masculinist political and epistemological requirements.

  The dilemma facing black women scholars engaged in creating black feminist thought is that a knowledge claim that meets the criteria of adequacy for one group and thus is judged to be an acceptable knowledge claim may not be translatable into the terms of a different group. Using the example of Black English, June Jordan illustrates the difficulty of moving among epistemologies: “You cannot ‘translate’ instances of Standard English preoccupied with abstraction or with nothing/nobody evidently alive into Black English. That would warp the language into uses antithetical to the guiding perspective of its community of users. Rather you must first change those Standard English sentences themselves into ideas consistent with the person-centered assumptions of Black English.”67 While both worldviews share a common vocabulary, the ideas themselves defy direct translation.

  Once black feminist scholars face the notion that, on certain dimensions of a black women’s standpoint, it may be fruitless to try to translate ideas from an Afrocentric feminist epistemology into a Eurocentric masculinist epistemology, then the choices become clearer. Rather than trying to uncover universal knowledge claims that can withstand the translation from one epistemology to another, time might be better spent rearticulating a black women’s standpoint in order to give African American women the tools to resist their own subordination. The goal here is not one of integrating black female “folk culture” into the substantiated body of academic knowledge, for that substantiated knowledge is, in many ways, antithetical to the best interests of black women. Rather, the process is one of rearticulating a preexisting black women’s standpoint and recentering the language of existing academic discourse to accommodate these knowledge claims. For those black women scholars engaged in this rearticulation process, the social construction of black feminist thought requires the skill and sophistication to decide which knowledge claims can be validated using the epistemological assumptions of one but not both frameworks, which claims can be generated in one framework and only partially accommodated by the other, and which claims can be made in both frameworks without violating the basic political and epistemological assumptions of either.

  Black feminist scholars offering knowledge claims that cannot be accommodated by both frameworks face the choice between accepting the taken-for-granted assumptions that permeate white-male-controlled academic institutions or leaving academia. Those black women who choose to remain in academia must accept the possibility that their knowledge claims will be limited to their claims about black women that are consistent with a white male worldview. And yet those African American women who leave academia may find their work is inaccessible to scholarly communities.

  Black feminist scholars offering knowledge claims that can be partially accommodated by both epistemologies can create a body of thought that stands outside of either. Rather than trying to synthesize competing worldviews that, at this point in time, defy reconciliation, their task is to point out common themes and concerns. By making creative use of their status as mediators, their thought becomes an entity unto itself that is rooted in two distinct political and epistemological contexts.68

  Those black feminists who develop knowledge claims that both epistemologies can accommodate may have found a route to the elusive goal of generating so-called objective generalizations that can stand as universal truths. Those ideas that are validated as true by African American women, African American men, white men, white women, and other groups with distinctive standpoints, with each group using the epistemological approaches growing from its unique standpoint, thus become the most objective truths.69

  Alternative knowledge claims, in and of themselves, are rarely threatening to conventional knowledge. Such claims are routinely ignored, discredited, or simply absorbed and marginalized in existing paradigms. Much more threatening is the challenge that alternative epistemologies offer to the basic process used by the powerful to legitimate their knowledge claims. If the epistemology used to validate knowledge comes into question, then all prior knowledge claims validated under the dominant model become suspect. An alternative epistemology challenges all certified knowledge and opens up the question of whether what has been taken to be true can stand the test of alternative ways of validating truth. The existence of an independent black women’s standpoint using an Afrocentric feminist epistemology calls into question the content of what currently passes as truth and simultaneously challenges the process of arriving at that truth.

  ENDNOTES

  1 For analyses of how interlocking systems of oppression affect black women, see Frances Beale, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” in The Black Woman, ed. Toni Cade (New York: Signet, 1970); Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981); Bonnie Thornton Dill, “Race, Class, and Gender: Prospects for an All-Inclusive Sisterhood,” Feminist Studies 9, no. 1 (1983): 131-50; bell hooks, Ain‘t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Diane Lewis, “A Response to Inequality: Black Women, Racism, and Sexism,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3, no. 2 (Winter 1977): 339-61; Pauli Murray, “The Liberation of Black Women,” in Voices of the New Feminism, ed. Mary Lou Thompson (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 87-102; and the introduction in Filomina Chioma Steady, The Black Woman Cross-Culturally (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1981), 7—41.

  2 See the introduction in Steady for an overview of black women’s strengths. This strength-resiliency perspective has greatly influenced empirical work on African American women. See, e.g., Joyce Ladner�
��s study of low-income black adolescent girls, Tomorrow’s Tomorrow (New York: Doubleday, 1971); and Lena Wright Myers’s work on black women’s self-concept, Black Women: Do They Cope Better? (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980). For discussions of black women’s resistance, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Strategies and Forms of Resistance: Focus on Slave Women in the United States,” in In Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean and Afro-American History, ed. Gary Y. Okihiro (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 143—65; and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Black Women in Resistance: A Cross-Cultural Perspective,” in Okihiro, In Resistance, 188—209. For a comprehensive discussion of everyday resistance, see James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).

  3 See Patricia Hill Collins’s analysis of the substantive content of black feminist thought in “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Social Problems 33, no. 6 (1986): 14-32.

  4 Scott describes consciousness as the meaning that people give to their acts through the symbols, norms, and ideological forms they create.

  5 This thesis is found in scholarship of varying theoretical perspectives. For example, Marxist analyses of working-class consciousness claim that “false consciousness” makes the working class unable to penetrate the hegemony of ruling-class ideologies. See Scott’s critique of this literature.

  6 For example, in Western societies, African Americans have been judged as being less capable of intellectual excellence, more suited to manual labor, and therefore less human than whites. Similarly, white women have been assigned roles as emotional, irrational creatures ruled by passions and biological urges. They too have been stigmatized as being less than fully human, as being objects. For a discussion of the importance that objectification and dehumanization play in maintaining systems of domination, see Arthur Brittan and Mary Maynard, Sexism, Racism and Oppression (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984).

  7 The tendency for Western scholarship to assess black culture as pathological and deviant illustrates this process. See Rhett S. Jones, “Proving Blacks Inferior: The Sociology of Knowledge,” in The Death of White Sociology, ed. Joyce Ladner (New York: Vintage, 1973), 114—35.

  8 The presence of an independent standpoint does not mean that it is uniformly shared by all black women or even that black women fully recognize its contours. By using the concept of standpoint, I do not mean to minimize the rich diversity existing among African American women. I use the phrase “black women’s standpoint” to emphasize the plurality of experiences within the overarching term “standpoint.” For discussions of the concept of standpoint, see Nancy M. Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in Discovering Reality, ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka (Boston: D. Reidel, 1983), 283—310; Money, Sex, and Power (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983); and Alison M. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983), 377—89. My use of the standpoint epistemologies as an organizing concept in this essay does not mean that the concept is problem-free. For a helpful critique of standpoint epistemologies, see Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).

  9 One contribution of contemporary black women’s studies is its documentation of how race, class, and gender have structured these differences. For representative works surveying African American women’s experiences, see Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984); and Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

  10 For example, Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985); and Bonnie Thornton Dill, “ ‘The Means to Put My Children Through’: Child-Rearing Goals and Strategies among Black Female Domestic Servants,” in The Black Woman, ed. LaFrances Rodgers-Rose (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1980), 107—23, report that black domestic workers do not see themselves as being the devalued workers that their employers perceive and construct their own interpretations of the meaning of their work. For additional discussions of how black women’s consciousness is shaped by the material conditions they encounter, see Ladner, Tomorrow’s Tomorrow; Myers, Black Women; and Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “‘Together and in Harness’: Women’s Traditions in the Sanctified Church,” Signs to, no. 4 (Summer 1985): 678—99. See also Marcia Westkott’s discussion of consciousness as a sphere of freedom for women in “Feminist Criticism of the Social Sciences,” Harvard Educational Review 49, no. 4 (1979): 422—30.

  11 John Langston Gwaltney, Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America (New York: Vintage, 1980), 4.

  12 Ibid., 33.

  13 Ibid., 88.

  14 Ibid., 7.

  15 Victoria Byerly, Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South (New York: ILR Press, 1986), 134.

  16 See Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Doubleday, 1966), for a discussion of everyday thought and the role of experts in articulating specialized thought.

  17 See Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), especially 93.

  18 In discussing standpoint epistemologies, Hartsock, in Money, Sex, and Power, notes that a standpoint is “achieved rather than obvious, a mediated rather than immediate understanding” (132).

  19 See Scott, Weapons of the Weak; and Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power.

  20 Some readers may question how one determines whether the ideas of any given African American woman are “feminist” and “Afrocentric.” I offer the following working definitions. I agree with the general definition of feminist consciousness provided by black feminist sociologist Deborah K. King: “Any purposes, goals, and activities that seek to enhance the potential of women, to ensure their liberty, afford them equal opportunity, and to permit and encourage their self-determination represent a feminist consciousness, even if they occur within a racial community” (in “Race, Class and Gender Salience in Black Women’s Womanist Consciousness” [typescript, Dartmouth College, Department of Sociology, Hanover, NH, 1987], 22). To be black or Afrocentric, such thought must not only reflect a similar concern for the self-determination of African American people, but must in some way draw upon key elements of an Afrocentric tradition as well.

  21 The Eurocentric masculinist process is defined here as the institutions, paradigms, and any elements of the knowledge-validation procedure controlled by white males and whose purpose is to represent a white male standpoint. While this process represents the interests of powerful white males, various dimensions of the process are not necessarily managed by white males themselves.

  22 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (1936; reprint, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1954), 276.

  23 The knowledge-validation model used in this essay is taken from Michael Mulkay, Science and the Sociology of Knowledge (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1979). For a general discussion of the structure of knowledge, see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

  24 For analyses of the content and functions of images of black female inferiority, see Mae King, “The Politics of Sexual Stereotypes,” Black Scholar 4, nos. 6—7 (1973): 12—23; Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “From Slavery to Social Welfare: Racism and the Control of Black Women,” in Class, Race, and Sex: The Dynamics of Control, ed. Amy Smerdlow and Helen Lessinger (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), 288—300; and Elizabeth Higginbotham, “Two Representative Issues in Contemporary Sociological Work on Black Women,” in All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, ed. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982).

/>   25 Kun, The Structure.

  26 Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 167.

  27 Maxine Baca Zinn, Lynn Weber Cannon, Elizabeth Higginbotham, and Bonnie Thornton Dill, “The Cost of Exclusionary Practices in Women’s Studies,” Signs II, no. 2 (Winter 1986): 290—303.

  28 Berger and Luckmann (in The Social Construction of Reality) note that if an outsider group, in this case African American women, recognizes that the insider group, namely, white men, requires special privileges from the larger society, a special problem arises of keeping the outsiders out and at the same time having them acknowledge the legitimacy of this procedure. Accepting a few “safe” outsiders is one way of addressing this legitimation problem. Collins’s discussion (in “Learning from the Outsider Within”) of black women as “outsiders within” addresses this issue. Other relevant works include Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the role of the national middle class in maintaining colonial systems, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1963); and William Tabb’s discussion of the use of “bright natives” in controlling African American communities, The Political Economy of the Black Ghetto (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970).

  29 While I have been describing Eurocentric masculinist approaches as a single process, there are many schools of thought or paradigms subsumed under this one process. Positivism represents one such paradigm. See Harding, The Science Question, for an overview and critique of this literature. The following discussion depends heavily on Jaggar, Feminist Politics, 355—58.

  30 Jaggar, Feminist Politics, 356.