Black women theorizing together occupies a terrain long denied them
Evidence
Again and again, black women find our efforts to speak, to break silence and engage in radical progressive political debates, opposed. There is a link between the silencing we experience, the censoring, the anti-intellectualism in predominantly black settings that are supposedly supportive (like all-black woman space), and that silencing that takes place in institutions wherein black women and women of color are told that we can not be fully heard or listened to because our work is not theoretical enough. … Just as some elite academics who construct theories of “blackness” in ways that make it a critical terrain which only the chosen few can enter—using theoretical work on race to assert their authority over black experience, denying democratic access to the process of theory making— threaten collective black liberation struggle, so do those among us who react to this by promoting anti-intellectualism by declaring all theory as worthless. By reinforcing the idea that there is a split between theory and practice or by creating such a split, both groups deny the power of liberatory education for critical consciousness, there by perpetuating conditions that reinforce our collective exploitation and repression. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 147 (
#corroborates, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Fear of isolation deters black women from publicly embracing feminist politics; Early feminist theory lacked recognition of black women as knowing subjects; Anti-intellectualism and academic exclusion silence Black women from both ends (+10 more)
Broader Connections
- Black women needed a separate feminist intellectual tradition
#expands(0.90) - Both academic gatekeeping and anti-intellectualism reinforce black women’s oppression
#corroborates(0.88) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 147 - Anti-intellectualism and academic exclusion silence Black women from both ends
#corroborates(0.86) - Black women who overcome sexism and racism develop liberatory strategies to share
#exemplifies(0.85) - Literary criticism gave black women a safe venue that feminist theory denied them
#exemplifies(0.83) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 227 - Black women without formal theory provided practical blueprints for liberation
#exemplifies(0.82) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 20 - Women’s isolation from each other blocks recognition that their subjectivity struggles are shared
#corroborates(0.78) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 73 - Meeting spaces let black Baptist women define themselves against racist depiction
#exemplifies(0.77) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 854 - Black women faced pressure from both whites and blacks to separate racism from sexism
#corroborates(0.76) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 46 - Black women produced gender scholarship while declining to claim the feminist label
#complicates(0.75) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 228