Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  31 See Keller, Reflections on Gender, 67—126, especially her analysis of static autonomy and its relation to objectivity.

  32 Ironically, researchers must “objectify” themselves to achieve this lack of bias. See Arlie Russell Hochschild, “The Sociology of Feeling and Emotion: Selected Possibilities,” in Another Voice: Feminist Perspectives on Social Life and Social Science, ed. Marcia Millman and Rosabeth Kanter (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1975), 280—307. Also, see Jaggar, Feminist Politics.

  33 See Norma Haan, Robert Bellah, Paul Rabinow, and William Sullivan, eds., Social Science as Moral Inquiry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), especially Michelle Z. Rosaldo’s “Moral/Analytic Dilemmas Posed by the Intersection of Feminism and Social Science,” 76—96; and Robert Bellah’s “The Ethical Aims of Social Inquiry,” 360—81.

  34 Janice Moulton, “A Paradigm of Philosophy: The Adversary Method,” in Harding and Hintikka, Discovering Reality, 149—64.

  35 For detailed discussions of the Afrocentric worldview, see John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (London: Heinemann, 1969); Dominique Zahan, The Religion, Spirituality, and Thought of Traditional Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); and Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), 1—76.

  36 For representative works applying these concepts to African American culture, see Niara Sudarkasa, “Interpreting the African Heritage in Afro-American Family Organization,” in Black Families, ed. Harriette Pipes McAdoo (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1981); Henry H. Mitchell and Nicholas Cooper Lewter, Soul Theology: The Heart of American Black Culture (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986); Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage, 1983); and Ortiz M. Walton, “Comparative Analysis of the African and the Western Aesthetics,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 154—64.

  37 One of the best discussions of an Afrocentric epistemology is offered by James E. Turner, “Foreword: Africana Studies and Epistemology; a Discourse in the Sociology of Knowledge,” in The Next Decade: Theoretical and Research Issues in Africana Studies, ed. James E. Turner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Africana Studies and Research Center, 1984), v-xxv. See also Vernon Dixon, “World Views and Research Methodology,” summarized in Harding, The Science Question, 170.

  38 See Hester Eisenstein, Contemporary Feminist Thought (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983). Nancy Hartsock’s Money, Sex, and Power, 145—209, offers a particularly insightful analysis of women’s oppression.

  39 For discussions of feminist consciousness, see Dorothy Smith, “A Sociology for Women,” in The Prism of Sex: Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Julia A. Sherman and Evelyn T. Beck (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979); and Michelle Z. Rosaldo, “Women, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview,” in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), 17—42. Feminist epistemologies are surveyed by Jaggar, Feminist Politics.

  40 One significant difference between Afrocentric and feminist standpoints is that much of what is termed womens culture is, unlike African American culture, treated in the context of and produced by oppression. Those who argue for a women’s culture are electing to value, rather than denigrate, those traits associated with females in white patriarchal societies. While this choice is important, it is not the same as identifying an independent, historical culture associated with a society. I am indebted to Deborah K. King for this point.

  41 Critiques of the Eurocentric masculinist knowledge-validation process by both Africanist and feminist scholars illustrate this point. What one group labels “white” and “Eurocentric,” the other describes as “male-dominated” and “masculinist.” Although he does not emphasize its patriarchal and racist features, Morris Berman’s The Reenchantment of the World (New York: Bantam Books, 1981) provides a historical discussion of Western thought. Afrocentric analyses of this same process can be found in Molefi Kete Asante, “International/Intercultural Relations,” in Contemporary Black Thought, ed. Molefi Kete Asante and Abdulai S. Vandi (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1980), 43—58; and Dona Richards, “European Mythology: The Ideology of ‘Progress,’” in Asante and Vandi, Contemporary Black Thought, 59—79. For feminist analyses, see Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power. Harding also discusses this similarity (see Chap. 7, “Other ‘Others’ and Fractured Identities: Issues for Epistemologists,” 63—96).

  42 Harding, The Science Question, 166.

  43 D. King, “Race, Class and Gender Salience.”

  44 Bonnie Thornton Dill, “The Dialectics of Black Womanhood,” Signs 4, no. 3 (Spring 1979): 543—55.

  45 One implication of standpoint approaches is that the more subordinate the group, the purer the vision of the oppressed group. This is an outcome of the origins of standpoint approaches in Marxist social theory, itself a dualistic analysis of social structure. Because such approaches rely on quantifying and ranking human oppressions—familiar tenets of positivist approaches—they are rejected by blacks and feminists alike. See Harding, The Science Question, for a discussion of this point. See also Elizabeth V. Spelman’s discussion of the fallacy of additive oppression in “Theories of Race and Gender: The Erasure of Black Women,” Quest 5, no. 4 (1982): 36—62.

  46 Class differences among black women may be marked. For example, see Paula Giddings’s analysis (in When and Where I Enter) of the role of social class in shaping black women’s political activism; or Elizabeth Higginbotham’s study of the effects of social class in black women’s college attendance in “Race and Class Barriers to Black Women’s College Attendance,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 13, no. 1 (1985): 89—107. Those African American women who have experienced the greatest degree of convergence of race, class, and gender oppression may be in a better position to recognize and use an alternative epistemology.

  47 Gwaltney, Drylongso, 83.

  48 William L. Andrews, Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 85.

  49 Gwaltney, Drylongso, 147.

  50 Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 76.

  51 Gwaltney,Drylongso, 68.

  52 Ibid., 7.

  53 Ibid., 27, 33.

  54 Elsa Barkley Brown, “Hearing Our Mothers’ Lives” (paper presented at the Fifteenth Anniversary Faculty Lecture Series, African American and African Studies, Emory University, Atlanta, 1986).

  55 Ladner, Tomorrow’s Tomorrow.

  56 Mitchell and Lewter, Soul Theology. The use of the narrative approach in African American theology exemplifies an inductive system of logic alternately called “folk wisdom” or a survival-based, need-oriented method of assessing knowledge claims.

  57 Ibid., 8.

  58 June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays (Boston: South End Press, 1985), 26.

  59 Mary Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger, and Jill Tarule, Women’s Ways of Knowing (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 113.

  60 Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power, 237; and Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978).

  61 Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987).

  62 Byerly, Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls, 198.

  63 For black women’s centrality in the family, see Steady, The Black Woman; Ladner, Tomorrow’s Tomorrow; Brown, “Hearing Our Mothers’ Lives”; and McAdoo, Black Families. See Gilkes, “‘Together and in Harness,’ ” for black women in the church; and chapter 4 of Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985). See also Gloria Joseph, “Black Mothers and Daughters: Their Roles and Functions in American Society,” in Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Persp
ectives, ed. Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1981), 75—126. Even though black women play essential roles in black families and black churches, these institutions are not free from sexism.

  64 Black men, white women, and members of other race, class, and gender groups should be encouraged to interpret, teach, and critique the black feminist thought produced by African American women.

  65 Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 91.

  66 Gwaltney, Drylongso.

  67 Jordan, On Call, 130.

  68 Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within.”

  69 This point addresses the question of relativity in the sociology of knowledge and offers a way of regulating competing knowledge claims.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Body Politic: Sexuality, Violence, and Reproduction

  ... black women are the beached whales of the sexual universe, unvoiced, misseen, not doing, awaiting their verb. Their sexual experiences are depicted, but not often by them.... they have had long experience with the brutalizations of male power, are subject to rape, know their womanhood and sexual being as crucially related and decisively timed moments in the creation and nurture of human life....

  —HORTENSE SPILLERS, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words”

  INTRODUCTION

  Black women’s bodies have been sites of contestation since Europeans first set foot on African soil to appropriate free labor for the brutal system of slavery. Myths about black female sexuality, born on the African continent, would follow black women to the “New World” and help to justify their sexual exploitation for generations thereafter.

  Contemporary black feminists concern themselves with a broader discourse on sexuality and reproduction. They write about abortion, incest, lesbianism, homophobia, rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment. Their concerns transcend geographical boundaries because of their global perspective on the oppression of women. Their African diasporan or Pan-African perspective demands that they be in solidarity with women of African descent throughout the world and that they struggle with them around issues of particular concern to women. This includes the elimination of poverty and disease and barriers to women’s emancipation. It also includes issues around reproductive health, including the controversial practice of female genital mutilation. Ultimately, issues surrounding the body politic, in all their complexity, will profoundly impact the well-being and survival of black women and their families.

  Barbara Omolade

  Barbara Omolade, an activist, writer, and professor, grew up in New York City and participated in both the civil rights and women’s movements. While a senior in college, she worked in the New York SNCC offices where she became a nationalist, an intellectual, and serious about political matters and African culture. While on welfare as a single mother, she read Gerda Lerner’s Black Women in White America and decided to pursue graduate study. A job at a battered women’s shelter (after welfare) inspired her to read (The Rising Song, xii) and in 1970 she returned to the academy and taught a course on black women. In the late 1970s she worked at Women’s Action Alliance and Women’s Survival Space and volunteered with The Black United Front and The Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers.

  “Hearts of Darkness,” which appeared in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (1983), is a historical essay dealing with the neglected topic of black female sexuality in which Omalade critiques the myth of black women as mainly victims. The essay is also a black feminist rendering of the complex sexual history of the United States.

  Her book, The Rising Song of African American Women (1994), a provocative collection of autobiographical/political essays, chronicles her development as a “race woman” and black feminist activist/teacher. It includes her previously published essay on black feminist pedagogy, analyses of the Central Park jogger case, black women troops in the Gulf War, and the Tawana Brawley saga. Omolade works at City College at the Center for Worker Education in New York.

  HEARTS OF DARKNESS

  The sexual history of the United States began at the historical moment when European men met African women in the “heart of darkness”1 —Mother Africa. They faced each other as conqueror and conquered: African women captives were considered the sexual property of the European conquerors.2

  The African sexuality confronted by European men was an integral part of a sensuality that permeated music, dance, and religion. West African women often performed dances such as the “crotch dance, an improvised folk drama enacted by the women at the height of the birth celebration, in which women strike their crotches firmly with both their hands.”3 However tactile, pleasurable, and comfortable these daily creative art forms, they were not necessarily indicative of sexual promiscuity. Rather, African cultures taught men and women to use their bodies in fluid, rhythmic ways, within a sexual code of behavior that frequently countenanced murdering women who committed adultery and often practiced female clitoridectomy. 4 The African woman who faced the European man was a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister, nestled in tribal societies and protected by fathers, husbands, and brothers who upheld the sanctity and primacy of marriage and motherhood for women.

  Nevertheless, in the hip-shaking, bare-breasted women with sweating bodies who danced to drums played by intense black men, in the market women and nursing mothers wrapped in African cloth, in the scantily clad farming women, the European man saw a being who embodied all that was evil and profane to his sensibilities. He perceived the African’s sensual ways according to his own cultural definitions of sex, nudity, and blackness as base, foul, and bestial. He did not attempt to understand how Africans defined their own behavior.5 He made assumptions and invented knowledge about their behavior as he created the conditions for this “knowledge” to become the reality. He viewed the African expression of sensuality through public rites, rituals, and dances as evidence of the absence of any sexual codes of behavior, an idea that both fascinated and repelled him and also provided him with a needed rationale for the economic exploitation of African men and women.

  As historian Richard Hofstadter explains:Naked and libidinous: for the white man’s preoccupation with Negro sexuality was there at the very beginning, an outcome not only of his own guilt at sexual exploitation—his easy access to the black woman was immediately blamed on her lasciviousness—but also of his envious suspicion that some extraordinary potency and ecstatic experience were associated with primitive lust.6

  Within the strange “commingling of desire and hate,”7 white men would continue to penetrate and plunder Mother Africa for five centuries while creating a worldview centered around the myth of race and racism that upheld white supremacy and the total domination of black people.

  The sexual history of the United States became fused with contradiction and duality, with myth and distortion, with the white man’s hate and desire for the black woman, with competition and jealousy between white and black women for white men, with love and struggle between black men and black women. American sexual history reflects the development of patriarchal control stretched to its maximum extent by European men operating within a racial caste system supported by state power in which white maleness becomes the only definition of being. Simultaneously, the extremes of American patriarchy, particularly under slavery, pushed black women outside traditional patriarchal protection, thereby transforming all previous definitions of womanhood, particularly the idea that woman requires male protection because of her innate weakness and inferiority.8 Black women were oppressed and exploited labor and as such were forced to redefine themselves as women outside of and antagonistic to the racial patriarch, who denied their being. Most black women refused to accept the traditional notions of subordination of woman to man. The black woman resisted racial patriarchy by escaping, stealing, killing, outsmarting, and bargaining with her white master while she had sex with him, had babies by him, ministered to his needs, growing “to know all there was to know about him.”9 At the
same time, most black women accepted traditional notions of patriarchy from black men because they viewed the Afro-Christian tradition of woman as mother and wife as personally desirable and politically necessary for black people’s survival.

  The racial patriarchy of the white man enabled him to enact his culture’s separation between the goodness, purity, innocence, and frailty of woman with the sinful, evil strength, and carnal knowledge of woman by having sex with white women, who came to embody the former, and black women, who came to embody the latter.10 The white man’s division of the sexual attributes of women based on race meant that he alone could claim to be sexually free: he was free to be sexually active within a society that upheld the chastity and modesty of white women as the “repositories of white civilization.”11 He was free to be irresponsible about the consequences of his sexual behavior with black women within a culture that placed a great value on the family as a sacred institution protecting women, their progeny, and his property. He was free to use violence to eliminate his competition with black men for black or white women, thus breaking the customary allegiance among all patriarchs. He was also free to maintain his public hatred of racial mixing while privately expressing his desire for black women’s bodies. Ultimately, white men were politically empowered to dominate all women and all black men and women; this was their sexual freedom.

  From the beginning, the founding fathers assumed the patriarchal right to regulate and define the sexual behavior of their servants and slaves according to a fusion of Protestantism, English Common Law, and personal whim. During the early colonial period the distinctions between indentured servant and slave were blurred and relative: most workers, black and white, male and female, worked without direct payment or without control over their labor. These laborers shared enough common experiences to jointly attack their masters and to have sex with each other.12 The master’s racial attitudes of antipathy toward black people and his fears of a unified antagonistic force of all workers, including Indian women and men, demanded that the category “white” be expanded to give political power and freedom to all white men (theoretically and potentially, if not at that actual historical time) and patriarchal protection and white privilege to all white women. Thus, during the later colonial period, black men and white women who had sex, married, and/or had children were punished and persecuted as American society denied them the right to choose each other as mates.13 The category “white” would also mean that the people designated “black” could be held in perpetual slavery.14 Therefore, laws were passed and practices instituted to regulate the sexual and social behavior of white and black, servants and slaves. The legal and actual distinction between slave and servant was widened with “slavery reflecting lifelong power relationships, while servitude became a more temporary relationship of service.”15 In other words, in spite of the common experiences of black and white workers in colonial America, indentured servants were whitened as slaves became black.