Black feminism and womanism as it grows within the African diaspora.

1. BLACK
FEMINISM/AFRICANA
WOMANISM
Two Arms/1 Body

2. Objectives
 Discuss the tenets of Feminism
 Describe how white feminism has been
exclusionary toward Black women
 Compare and contrast Africana Womanism
and Black Feminism
 Consider how to turn awareness into agency

3. Africana Womanism
 In the American experience the feminist movement
had effectively displaced Black unity, whether in
the context of the Abolitionist movement, the right
to vote movement or the civil rights movement.
And so we sit idly by and let whites turn Harriet
Tuman and Rosa Parks into supporters for White
feminism as opposed to race defenders. Iva E.
Carruthers.

4. Black Feminism
 Emerged in the 1970s
 Offshoot of white feminism
 Embraced by many Black women

5. Many Black Women
 Have outright rejected feminism
 Consider adoption incompatible with
the needs of the community
 Reject feminism on the premise that
the sole focus on Black women’s
interests undermine community needs.

6. Terminology
 Orders priorities
 Accepts historical context
 Frames practice

7. White Feminism
 Historically led by white middle-class women
 Has a racially exclusive legacy
 Places all women’s history under a universal
umbrella

8. Excludes non-White Contributions
 Harriet Tubman
 Sojoiner Truth
 Ida B. Wells-Barnett
 Rosa Parks

9. Nomo
 African philosophy of naming
 Self-definition creates the limits and direction of
any concept
 Female is very narrow in definition
 Only women can be called women by definition
 Africana as a descriptor creates specificity

10. Africana Womanism
 Centered around family/community
 Recognizes sexual politics
 Contextualizes the historical context of Black
women’s positionality
 Does not recognize the male counterpart as a the
primary enemy to her progress

11. Africana Womanism Perspective
 Eliminate the ways in which racism shapes the
experience of the Black Community
 The impact of sexism is subsidiary to racism
 The wage gap between Black and white women is
reflective of that.
 Reflects the needs of Black women, rather than the
needs of the white middle class
 Ultimately, gender discrimination affects everyone.

12. Wage Gap by Gender and Race

13. Black Feminist Thought
 By stressing how African-American women must
become self-defined and self-determining within
intersecting oppressions, Black feminist thought
emphasizes the importance of knowledge for
empowerment. Ideas matter, but doing “plenty of
work” may matter even more. Historically, U.S. Black
women’s activism demonstrates that becoming
empowered requires more than changing the
consciousness of individual Black women via Black
community development strategies. Empowerment also
requires transforming unjust social institutions that
African-Americans encounter from one generation to
the next.

14. Contributions
 Intersectionality creates a fundamental
paradigmatic shift in how we think about unjust
power-relations
 That understanding can also be sued to frame
agency towards resistance
 Black Feminist thought creates a framework to
address epistemological perspectives that validate
oppressive conditions.
 Criticizing prevailing knowledge helps to
create self-definitions and define own terms

15. Power and Empowerment
 Understand the dialectical relationship between
oppression and activism
 This visualizes change as a result of agency
 Understand terms for interest convergence

 Use understanding to formulate strategy and
iterative processes.

16. Structural Domain of Power
 Power cannot accrue without the transformation of
American institutions
 This has historically happened very grudgingly
 Change has also been the cause of oppressive
uprisings
 Class action lawsuits and executive orders have
changed the power-dynamic
 However, that change is limited to enforcement
and the “interpretation of the law”

17. Possessive Investment of Power
 Power is protected
 Popular system of commonsense perpetuate
ideas of who is eligible to wield power
 Borders are policed through logical systems and
“legal” practices
 Black women are expected to submit to all men and
are seen as insubordinate otherwise
 Asians and other members of underprivileged
groups are encouraged to devalue the labor and
contributions of Blacks

18. Outsider Within
 Black women are under surveillance within white
institutions
 Black women have the power to keep institutions
themselves under surveillance
 Black women also have the ability to “work the
cracks” of the egg.

19. Aint I Woman?

20. Vision
 Go beyond permanent oppressors and perpetual
victims
 Use the shifting categories within a matrix of
domination to stimulate empowerment
 Minimize oppression at the intersection of
objective and subjective violence
 Utilize knowledge (counter-narrative) to position
awareness to frame change initiatives