Words of Fire (81 page)

Black feminist pedagogy as a philosophy of liberation for humankind, is designed to enable students, through the social, economic, cultural, moral, and religious history of Third World people, to reexamine and see the world through a perspective that would instill a revolutionary, conscious, liberating ideology. Black feminist pedagogy will be the medium for the message. The art and science of teaching as advocated by black feminist philosophy involves direct schooling for the future that holds viable options other than slave-slave master, or corporate giant-woeful worker, relationships. Students will be the building blocks, the true agents for radical change. The teaching of history from the black feminist perspective is not to imply a one-sided view of history, for as Raya Dunayevskaya so eloquently states in her essay, “Women as Thinkers and Revolutionaries,” “There is no such thing as black history that is not also white history. There is no such thing as women's history that is not the actual history of humanity's struggle toward freedom.”
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In discussing social relations in capitalist America, it is of critical importance to begin to examine the minds of the slave captor, power makers, or corporate monsters (however you wish to call those who control capitalist America) from the Afrocentric perspective. If the conceptual system has any validity, any value, it will be important to be able to compare and contrast for people two conceptual systems, that of the oppressed and that of the oppressors, because the two systems have different and very real consequences for their adherents....

Black feminist philosophy incorporates a conceptual system capable of being measured against other conceptual systems, and black feminist pedagogy will examine the capitalist mentality as well as the history and philosophy of the Native American Indians who believed that one can no more own the land that is a source of provision for humans and animals than one can own the air above the land. Teachers applying black feminist techniques do not view students as passive recipients. We need only to review the history of student uprisings worldwide to realize their revolutionary potential. What has been lacking in most of their social movements has been a well formulated ideology—one that has been instilled and internalized from an early age. Schooling in capitalist America has indeed instilled an ideology, but one designed to maintain the status quo. The black feminist pedagogy will supply students with an ideology that will provide the necessary materials for creating conditions needed for radical change.

Black feminist theory is a theory of change with black feminist pedagogy being the change agent in and outside of the classrooms—wherever education takes place. Black feminist theory does not see class as the primary contradiction with the working class being the agents for change. Rather it sees the primary contradiction to be power relations between blacks and whites, males and females, with black women being the change agents. Black feminist theory and Marxism both function on the premise that you have to look at specific historical forms of oppression, and that power has to be reconstituted, reconstructed, to help find a weak link. Black feminist theory challenges Marxist theory to consider race as a primary contradiction, and it challenges feminists (white feminist theorists) to recognize the automatic dual oppression of sexism and racism that Afro-American and all women of color in the United States face with a routineness akin to breathing. Black feminists ask Marxist and white feminists, “Is our liberation going to be a part of your revolution? And if so why is it not a major topic in your theory building—in your literature—in your consciousness?”

Classroom illustrations of black feminist pedagogy in practise will be helpful at this point. Students bring certain basic assumptions into the classrooms, and these assumptions reveal the power of ideology—the American-dream ideology. For example, black students will frequently describe experiences of blatant racial discrimination, then in Yuppie tones declare that “every one is equal, racial differences don't really matter, you can make it if you try hard enough.” Black and white female students will readily relate humiliating examples of sexist treatment, then, contradictory to their assertions, proclaim, “I think that with the proper qualifications women can make it in society today. Things have changed—took at Indira Gandhi, Geraldine Ferraro, and Corazon Aquino.” These students, black and white female and male, desperately want to believe in the American ideology that America is the land of opportunity and you can become anything you want if you try and work hard enough—what Bowles and Gintis refer to as the meritocratic ideology. Introduce to these students the more truthful belief that wealth in America is not the result of hard work, but rather the result of graft, corruption, and protected crime, and the resistance will be overwhelming. Teaching style and radicalized students are of great importance in overcoming such resistance.

The first classroom illustration occurs in a college course on Third-World women and feminism.
¹⁰
The topic of women and resistance led to the mentioning of Eleanor Bumpers, the black woman killed by a squad of policemen in SWAT gear. They were evicting her for being behind in her rent by approximately $98.

After explaining to the class who Eleanor Bumpers was, the statement was made that negligence in paying her rent had very little to do with her death. The students, predominantly white women, initially could not
understand what was meant by such a statement. Using the Socratic method, the students soon understood that Eleanor Bumpers's death was an illustration of the general treatment of blacks and poor people in our society.

It spoke of police brutality and racism in its worse form, that of seeing an individual as less than human because that person is nonwhite, poor, and elderly. It spoke of putting material wealth and value over human life. Further discussion concerned the inability of white feminists to identify and express national outrage over this incident. The shared historical experience of the black feminist instructor informed her/him that Eleanor Bumpers was fighting the same war of resistance against dehumanization and dominance that our ancestors in slavery fought. Later in the course the question of capital punishment came up....

The second illustration of the implementation of thinking black in the classroom is in a course on domestic violence. In a small Eastern college the students were asked to compile lists of adjectives that they associated with the black ghetto, suburbia, and Appalachia. The purpose was to compare similarities and differences in perceptions and then discuss the commonality of wife battering. The composition of the class was fifteen white females and three white males, six black and three Puerto Rican females, and one black male. Interestingly enough the white students glibly offered ghetto characteristics. These included: overcrowding, drugs, muggings, slum areas, poverty, and multiplicity of sexual partners. The last characteristic elicited a perceptible gasp of indignation from a black student. As the instructor heard the list grow, automatically she knew that accepting these responses was to accept a conceptual system that was inherently blaming the victim. That is to say that it was buying into an ideology that attributes defects and inadequacy to the malignant nature of poverty, injustice, slum life, and racial difficulties. The stigma that marks the victim and accounts for her/his victimization is an acquired stigma of social origin. But the stigma, though derived in the past from environmental forces is still located in the victim, inside her/his skin. Within this formation, the liberal humanitarian can have it both ways. She/he can concentrate her/his charitable interests on the defects of the victim, condemn the vague social and environmental stresses that produced the defect, and ignore the continuing effect of victimizing social forces. It justifies a perverse form of social action designed to change not society, but rather society's victim. It is this type of thinking that the Afrocentric conceptual system aims to undermine. Armed with such a scintillating weapon for change, the black feminist teacher artfully and skillfully interprets classroom interaction while never veering from the goals of liberation for humankind through the process of an analysis of oppressions....

This analysis of oppression stresses racial, sexual, and heterosexual oppression,
as well as class. The critical importance of the racial dimension was illustrated in the classroom example being discussed. The black and Puerto Rican students were asked for their lists of characteristics that they associate with the black ghetto. Leading the list was police brutality, followed by exploitation, slum landlords, worst quality of food in the neighborhood stores with the highest prices, corruption, and insensitive city officials. The discussion that followed concerned reality beginning with experience, and how divergent assumptions about the world leads to contrary references on the same event. It is noteworthy that despite the differences in economic backgrounds of the black and Puerto Rican students, and despite the fact that some were gay others not, inevitably their responses to black feminist pedagogy intimated that the black dimension is and has been critically significant in their lives and to their survival in capitalist America.

Comments from white students after exposure to black feminist pedagogy were uniform: the majority showed visible signs of being uncomfortable, but remained silent in their discontent and amazement. Slowly but surely, after mustering up much courage, they stated that they felt taken aback, silenced, afraid that they would be challenged with questions they were unable to answer because they had never “thought that way” before (that way being Afrocentric thought or “thinking black”). In response to their comments, the domestic Third World students countered, with assurance and conviction in their voices, expressions such as, “This is the first time in my school career that I feel comfortable, really comfortable, in a class, because I feel like the teacher understands where I'm coming from”; “I feel good about the class because all sides of a question are discussed. For once the white way is not the only way or the right way.” Eventually the vast majority of students realize and appreciate the value of being exposed to the consistency of a perspective that gives credence and respect to all peoples of different cultures....

Black feminist pedagogy has its roots in Africa, the mother of civilization. The philosophy and practice is applicable and beneficial to people throughout the world. That it holds specific relevancy for racism worldwide is extremely appropriate at this time in the 1980s. Racist mobs of young whites hurling insults and assaulting blacks, and white police regularly beating and brutalizing blacks with near impunity, are endemic to male violence and racist mentalities that distinguish the American landscape. White racist violence is flourishing under the Reagan administration, which has gutted civil rights enforcement and slashed social service spending while pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into militarization and his pestiferous pet—nuclear star wars....

Schooling in white capitalist America nourishes a system that helps to train/teach young white children to carry out their racist violence. It instills its white students with a cultural imperialism and intellectual ethnocentricism,
which fuels them with a white superiority that implicitly and explicitly encourages racism, sexism, and heterosexism. This same educational system fails to educate nonwhites, who attend classes with regularity or irregularity.

Black feminist pedagogy has as an end result the development of generations of black, white, Puerto Rican, Chicano, Asian American, and Native American people prepared to radically change capitalist white America. It is fitting to have black feminist pedagogy as the theoretical construct for educational change. Black women historically have been central to educational change as teachers, survival technicians, administrators, and revolutionary thinkers. It is politically sound to listen to the reason and intellect of our ancestral educational role models. A social movement led by black women—the vanguard—is in order. If and when persons with vision in America have sufficient power to radically change the social relations, black feminist pedagogy should be the prime blueprint for the task.

ENDNOTES

1
S. Bowles and H. Gintis,
Schooling in Capitalist America
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), 265.

2
A famous quote by Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, which appears in his
Souls of Black Folks
. The quote also appears on posters and postcards and has become a popular adage.

3
Unpublished essay by Dr. Robert Moore from a speech delivered in Toronto, Canada, in 1985 at an education conference.

4
C. T. Mohanty,
The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought; An Essay in the Sociology of Knowledge
(paper), 5.

5
Ibid, 14.

6
Ibid, 15.

7
For a full discussion of this literature, see L. Myers,
Contributions in Black Studies, How to Think Black: Toni Cade Bambara's
The Salt Eaters, 6, 1983—84, 39—44.

8
Unpublished essay by R. Moore, Panel on Education—Third National Convention of Women for Racial and Economic Equality, May 1984, 6.

9
R. Dunayevskaya, from the essay, “Women as Thinkers and Revolutionaries,”
Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution
, 80.

10
The classroom illustrations are based on actual experiences of the author.

E
lizabeth Higginbotham is associate professor of sociology and associate director of the Center for Research on Women at Memphis State University. Her current research is the upward mobility of women of color, and she is currently completing a book on educated black women. She has published widely on race, class, and gender in the lives of women, and is highly sought after in colleges and universities throughout the country because of her work at Memphis State, designing faculty development workshops on incorporating women of color into the college curriculum. Her essay “Designing an Inclusive Curriculum: Bringing All Women into the Core” (1990) grows out of this important work.