Words of Fire (62 page)

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.

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.