Ultimately, she falls prey to the positivist social science that she seeks to critique. She links positivist methodology to a Eurocentric masculinist knowledge-validation process that seeks to objectify and distance itself from the “objects” of study.54 Like Asante, she recognizes many of the shortcomings with mainstream social science research such as the tendency to create false objectivity. Yet also like Asante, she falls into a positivist trap. In her case, she brings her readers back to the possibility of universal truths.
Those black feminists who develop knowledge claims that both [Afrocentric and feminist] epistemologies can accommodate may have found a route to the elusive goal of generating so-called objective generalizations that can stand as universal truths.55
Like most positivists, she never asks, “whose universal truths are these anyway?” Collins’s quest for universal truth will be doomed to failure as long as she accepts as unproblematic an Afrocentric sisterhood across class, time, and geography. Her truths depend on an Afrocentric ideology that suppresses differences among African Americans.
Like all oppositional discourses, the Afrocentric feminism of Collins, Steady, and Terhog-Penn have multisided struggles. They compete for ideological space against the dominant discourse on Africa, its diaspora, and within feminist and nationalist movements. The dialectics of discursive struggle links their work to dominant discourse and other competing oppositional voices. Both dominant and counterdiscources occupy contested terrain. Afrocentric feminists may reveal an almost inescapable tendency in nationalist discourse that ties it to conservative agendas on gender and sexuality. At the same time, they reveal the strengths of nationalist ideology in its counterattack against racism.
ENDNOTES
1 See Cheryl Clarke, “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983), 197—208; and Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984).
2 They only need point to the racist scientific theories that AIDS began in Central Africa from people who ate [subtext: had sex with] green monkeys to prove this point. Spread by the popular and scientific media, this theory appealed to a white culture that still believes that black sexuality is out of control and animalistic. The scientific evidence contributed to the racist subtext of the anti-AIDS hysteria. See Evelynn Hammonds, “Race, Sex, AIDS: The Construction of ‘Other,’ ” Radical America 20, no. 6 (1986); and Evelynn Hammonds and Margaret Cerullo, “AIDS in Africa: The Western Imagination and the Dark Continent,” Radical America 21, nos. 2—3 (1987).
3 E. Frances White, “Civilization Denied: Questions on Black Athena,” Radical America 18, nos. 2—3 (1987): 5.
4 See, for example, Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origins of Civilization: Myth or Reality, trans. Mercer Cook (New York: Lawrence Hill, 1974).
5 Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of African Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 200 A.D. (Chicago: Third World Press, 1974).
6 Larry Delano Coleman, “Black Man/Black Woman: Can the Breach Be Healed?” Nile Review 2, no. 7: 6.
7 Cheryl Clarke, “The Failure to Transform,” has raised similar objections in this thoughtful essay. She argues that leftist male intellectuals have helped to institutionalize homophobia in the black community. I refer to this essay in more detail below.
8 Nathan Hare and Julia Hare, “The Rise of Homosexuality and Other Diverse Alternatives,” Black Male/Female Relationships 5 (1981): 10.
9 George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: H. Fertig Publishers, 1985).
10 According to George Mosse, ibid., German nationalists label certain people as “outsiders” who did not live up to the norms set up by nationalism and respectability. By labeling homosexuals, prostitutes, Jews, etc. as perverts who lived outside the boundaries of acceptable behavior, nationalists helped build cohesion. Jewish men, for example, were said to epitomize all that was unmanly and unvirile. By contrast, a good, manly German looked suspiciously at Jewish men. Many of the newly evolving negative identities and classifications fused with the stereotypes of Jews. In this way the rise of National Socialism was inextricably tied to the increase in anti-Semitism.
11 Ron M. Karenga. Introduction to Black Studies (Los Angeles: Kawaida Publications, 1982), 213.
12 See Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
13 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 11.
14 See James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Scott, however, may underemphasize the extent to which people are influenced by dominant hegemonies.
15 Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse, 68.
16 Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 338.
17 For further exploration of these ideas, see E. Frances White, “Racisme et sexisme: La confrontation des feministes noires aux formes conjointes de l’oppression,” Les Temps Modernes 42, no. 485 (December 1986): 173—84.
18 See Lorde, Sister Outsider.
19 For examples of white feminists who have been influenced by Audre Lorde’s insights, see Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Teresa de Lauretis, “Feminist Studies/ Critical Studies: Issues, Terms and contexts,” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. T. de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 1—19; and de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
20 Cherrie Moraga, Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasa por sus labios (Boston: South End Press, 1983), 99.
21 See also Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinster/Aunt Lite, 1987); and Norma Alarcón, “Chicana’s Feminist Literature: A Re-vision Through Malintzin or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzladúa (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981), 182—90.
22 Clarke, “The Failure to Transform,” 207.
23 Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 17.
24 Charlyn A. Harper-Bolton, “A Reconceptualization of the Black Woman,” Black Male/Female Relationships 6 (1982): 42.
25 Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, Transforming the Past: Traditions and Kinship Among Japanese Americans (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 18.
26 Molefi Kete Asante, The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 8, note 3.
27 Molefi Kete Asante, “Editor’s Note,” Journal of Black Studies 8, no. 2 (1977): 123.
28 Ibid., 123.
29 See Asante, The Afrocentric Idea.
30 V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 75—92.
31 Ibid., 89.
32 Asante, Afrocentric Idea, 8.
33 Allen, Black Amakening in Capitalist America.
34 See Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies.
35 Harper-Bolton, “A Reconceptualization of the Black Woman,” 32.
36 Ibid., 40.
37 See John Mbiti, African Religion and Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1970) and Wade Nobles, “Africanity: Its Role in Black Families,” Black Scholar 5, no. 9 (1974).
38 Rosalind Coward, Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983).
39 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde, African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 84—85.
40 Martin Chanock, “Making Customary Law: Men, Women, and Courts in Colonial Northern Rhodesia,” in African Women and the Law: Historical Perspective, ed. Margaret Jean Hay and Marcia Wright (Boston: Boston University Press, 1982).
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p; 41 See Harper-Bolton, “Reconceptualization of the Black Woman,” 38.
42 Ibid., 41.
43 Filomina Chioma Steady, “African Feminism: A Worldwide Perspective,” in Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, ed. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Andrea Rushing, and Sharon Harley (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1987).
44 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “African Feminism: A Theoretical Approach to the History of Women in the African Diaspora,” in Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, 49.
45 Ibid., 49; see also Filomena Steady, “African Feminism,” and Filomena Steady, “The Black Woman Cross-Culturally: An Overview,” in The Black Woman Cross-Culturally (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1981), 7—48.
46 Patricia Hill Collins, “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought,” Sikns: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14, no. 4 (1989): 750.
47 Ibid., 755.
48 Ibid.
49 See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
50 Collins, “Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought,” 748—49.
51 Ibid., 758.
52 Ibid., 757.
53 Ibid., 758.
54 Ironically, she shows how difficult it is to separate out knowledge-validation processes when she argues that we have to use different techniques to study black women than to study the powerful at the same time that much of her analysis depends on the insights of white men such as Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Doubleday, 1966).
55 Collins, “Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought,” 773.
Barbara Ransby and Tracye Matthews
Barbara Ransby is a member of the department of history at De Paul University, Chicago, and is a community activist and cofounder of the Ella Baker-Nelson Mandela Center. She is completing a biography on the life and political thought of civil rights activist Ella Baker and guest editing a special issue of Race and Class on “Black Women: A Global View for the 21st Century.” She is also one of the founders of the black feminist collective African American Women in Defense of Ourselves, which emerged in response to attacks on Anita Hill in 1991, when she accused Supreme Court justice nominee Clarence Thomas of having sexually harassed her a decade earlier.
Tracye Matthews, former director of the Ella Baker-Nelson Mandela Center, is completing a dissertation on the role of women in the Black Panther Party at the University of Michigan.
Ransby and Matthews are among a cadre of young black feminist scholars who are writing in the tradition of Anna Julia Cooper. Their essay, “Black Popular Culture and the Transcendence of Patriarchal Illusions,” which appeared in a 1993 issue of Race and Class, is a much needed critique of the misogyny of some segments of black popular culture. It also analyzes black nationalist discourse as patriarchal and insensitive to gender.
BLACK POPULAR CULTURE AND THE TRANSCENDENCE OF PATRIARCHAL ILLUSIONS
Over the past decade in African American communities throughout the United States, there has been a visible resurgence of various forms of black cultural nationalism. This has partly occurred in response to some of the crises currently facing African Americans, and partly reflects the sense of frustration and desperation many people, especially black youth, feel about the prospects for our collective future, and their hunger for some hopeful alternative.
There are three major components of this resurgence which have triggered heated debates within the halls of academia and on the streets of black America. They are: first, the cultural and intellectual movement known as Afrocentrism; second, a growing interest in and commercialization of the memory of Malcolm X; and third, the provocative and popular lyrics of certain subgenres of rap music, which have emerged within the larger context of what is termed Hip Hop culture. All three of these trends share two characteristics: they all contain an oppositional edge, which offers respite from the oppressive realities of daily life in a hostile dominant culture. At the same time, however, each trend represents a very male-centered definition of the problems confronting the black community and proposes pseudosolutions that further marginalize and denigrate black women. A masculinized vision of black empowerment and liberation resonates through the literature on Afrocentrism, the lyrics of male rappers, and the symbolic imagined homogeneous black community, the class biases in the rhetoric of the Afrocentric behaviorists is obvious. This racialized class discourse is painfully similar to the racist and sexist theory of the black matriarchy promoted by Daniel P. Moynihan in the 1960s to explain the reputed cultural inferiority, that is pathology, of “the matriarchal Negro family.” The solution, of course, is to celebrate and re-create artificially the “greatness” and “authenticity” of a mythical and generic ancient African family.
An important corollary to discussions of the breakdown of the black family is the cry for black male role models. The underlying assumption here is that we need strong black patriarchs to give moral direction to the floundering female-headed households that have destabilized the black community. This dialogue has been framed even more specifically within a discussion of the crisis of the black male. Clearly, there is a legitimate cause for concern and action to address the specific ways in which black men are victimized in our society. The statistics on black male incarceration, homicide, and unemployment are both frightening and familiar. Yet, aside from some weak and ineffectual calls for an end to racism and creation of jobs for black youth, many cultural nationalists emphasize the recognition and visibility of more black male role models, whether historical or contemporary, as the key to black community empowerment. The struggle is defined as one to reclaim and redefine black manhood. Ironically, this is also the point at which the politics and positions of some cultural nationalists, liberals, and right-wing conservatives seem to converge. Consistent with the view that the problem with black people is culturally based, and centered around an alleged crisis in black manhood, their arguments are again framed by the use of certain race-, class- and gender-coded terms that blame poor people for their own oppression. Personal characteristics such as low self-esteem, lack of self-awareness and pride and, most of all, lack of discipline are cited as the sources of many of the larger social problems confronting the black community, from drugs and gangs to teenage pregnancy.
In addition, the gendered nature of this discussion of the “problem with black people” becomes very obvious when one examines who is generally targeted, implicitly or explicitly, as its root cause. African American women, especially single mothers, are routinely vilified as the culprit. For example, regular attacks on our black women in the media, most often disguised as an attack on the admittedly inadequate welfare system, portray them as lazy, unfit mothers, members of a morally bankrupt underclass, who should be punished for their inability to sustain a middle-class family life-style on a subpoverty income. Programs are proposed and implemented that penalize black women and their children for the crime of being poor —for example, actions are being taken, at the local and national level, to make the surgical implant of the Norplant five-year contraceptive mandatory for women who receive welfare. In several states, funding restrictions have been imposed that will further impoverish women receiving public assistance by not affording women who have additional children any additional welfare benefits with which to feed and clothe the child. These women will have to stretch their meager allocations to accommodate the new family member or be forced to not have children. This type of anti-black woman victim blaming is echoed in the popular media—black and white—in some of the new black films being produced, such as on Malcolm X, in music lyrics, and in the theoretical debates about poverty.
MALCOLM X AND POPULAR CULTURE
Rap music and Malcolm X are two mainstays of popular black youth culture in the 1990s. Images of Malcolm are ubiquitous in African American communities from Harlem to South Central Los Angeles, and virtually every major city in between. In fact, the extensive commodification of Malcolm’s profile and his quotes in the f
orm of T-shirts, tennis shoes, posters, backpacks, baseball caps, and even underwear, is testimony to the ability of capitalism to exploit just about anything, including dead black revolutionaries. Similarly, the rap music industry, including rappers with explicitly political messages, has enjoyed considerable commercial success. But a careful scrutiny suggests that the more commercially successful artists are the ones whose music—like the pervasive images of Malcolm—has been sanitized and diluted, or at least sufficiently jumbled, as to be safe for mass consumption. (Even lyrical brews concocted with a distinctly militant flavor are frequently laced with enough counterproductive and counterrevolutionary messages, especially with regard to gender and the status of women, to dull their potentially radical edge.)
Just as rap artists have been labeled the “new black prophets,” Malcolm has been crowned our “shining black prince,” because both symbolize an uncompromising opposition to racism and cultural imperialism. Unfortunately, however, few critics have seriously interrogated the masculine imagery associated with these personas or the gender politics they represent. At a time when single black mothers are being ruthlessly maligned for contributing to the alleged moral decay of the larger black community, enter two types of black saviors, personified by Malcolm X, on the one hand, and rapper Ice Cube, on the other. Malcolm is the strong, powerful, dignified black patriarch standing at the head of his family, acting as protector and provider. Ice Cube, conversely, is, as he proudly proclaims in his recent album, “the pimp,” an angry macho, oversexed character, who, above all, is not soft. He doesn’t take insults from his enemies or back talk from his women. Thus, Malcolm is the redemptive black patriarch, and Ice Cube is the warrior black pimp. In all cultures, the authority of patriarchs and the power of pimps rests squarely on the backs of the women whom they control or exploit.
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