Both academic gatekeeping and anti-intellectualism reinforce black women’s oppression

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the split between theory and practice as itself an instrument of oppression rather than a neutral description.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: hooks names two mirror-image failings — elite theoretical gatekeeping and wholesale anti-intellectual rejection — as jointly reproducing exploitation. This claims a kind of false-dichotomy dynamic worth pressing on.
• XREF: Echoes the chapters on intimate partner violence and the ‘growing herd’ — how in-group policing (anti-intellectualism in supposedly supportive all-black woman space) enforces conformity, and how the excluded/policed must keep speaking against it. — connects to: Early women’s studies programs resisted curricula focused on black women.; Black women theorizing together occupies a terrain long denied them; Anti-intellectualism and academic exclusion silence Black women from both ends (+12 more)

Broader Connections

• Anti-intellectualism and academic exclusion silence Black women from both ends #corroborates (0.97)
• White acceptance of black intellectuals requires denying their genuine blackness #exemplifies (0.85) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 251
• Educated mulatto women rationalize anti-Negro prejudice through shifting evasive justifications #exemplifies (0.83) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 209
• Women of color face simultaneous oppression based on race and gender #expands (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1145
• Lowered expectations toward black women’s feminism is itself a racist patronizing act #exemplifies (0.81) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 204
• Educated women of color who disavow blackness pass that pathology on to students #expands (0.80)
• Racist, sexist socialization conditioned black women to devalue femaleness and identify only with race #expands (0.80) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 24
• Black women’s silence on sexism stemmed from socialization that devalued their femaleness #expands (0.79)
• Sexism and racism were twin oppressive forces in black women’s slave experience #exemplifies (0.78)
• Defensive interventions diverted black women from building black-centered feminist scholarship #responds-to (0.76) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 223
• Black-on-black oppression escapes condemnation by being misread as not-racism #complicates (0.74) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 321
• Black women experienced sexist oppression distinct from racism #qualifies (0.72) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 47