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What does it mean to ‘take subjectivity into account’?

Answer the question: “What does it mean to ‘take subjectivity into account’?”

Analyze some quotes

Embolden the main claim/thesis

Use the two sources addeed

A small girl and her mother passed a statue depicting a European man who had barehandedly
subdued a ferocious lion.The little girl stopped, looked puzzled and asked,
“Mama, something’s wrong with that statue. Everybody knows that a man can’t
whip a lion.” “But darling,” her mother replied, “you must remember that the man
made the statue.” —As told by Katie G. Cannon
As critical social theory, U.S. Black
feminist thought reflects the interests and standpoint of its creators.Tracing the
origin and diffusion of Black feminist thought or any comparable body of specialized
knowledge reveals its affinity to the power of the group that created it
(Mannheim 1936). Because elite White men control Western structures of
knowledge validation, their interests pervade the themes, paradigms, and epistemologies
of traditional scholarship. As a result, U.S. Black women’s experiences
as well as those of women of African descent transnationally have been routinely
distorted within or excluded from what counts as knowledge.
U.S. Black feminist thought as specialized thought reflects the distinctive
themes of African-American women’s experiences. Black feminist thought’s core
themes of work, family, sexual politics,motherhood, and political activism rely on
paradigms that emphasize the importance of intersecting oppressions in shaping
the U.S. matrix of domination. But expressing these themes and paradigms has
not been easy because Black women have had to struggle against White male
interpretations of the world.
In this context, Black feminist thought can best be viewed as subjugated
knowledge. Traditionally, the suppression of Black women’s ideas within Whitemale-
controlled social institutions led African-American women to use music,
literature, daily conversations, and everyday behavior as important locations for
11
BLACK
FEMINIST
EPISTEMOLOGY
11
constructing a Black feminist consciousness. More recently, higher education and
the news media have emerged as increasingly important sites for Black feminist
intellectual activity.Within these new social locations, Black feminist thought has
often become highly visible, yet curiously, despite this visibility, it has become
differently subjugated (Collins 1998a, 32–43).
Investigating the subjugated knowledge of subordinate groups—in this case
a Black women’s standpoint and Black feminist thought—requires more ingenuity
than that needed to examine the standpoints and thought of dominant
groups. I found my training as a social scientist inadequate to the task of studying
the subjugated knowledge of a Black women’s standpoint. This is because
subordinate groups have long had to use alternative ways to create independent
self-definitions and self-valuations and to rearticulate them through our own
specialists. Like other subordinate groups, African-American women not only
have developed a distinctive Black women’s standpoint, but have done so by
using alternative ways of producing and validating knowledge.
Epistemology constitutes an overarching theory of knowledge (Harding
1987). It investigates the standards used to assess knowledge or why we believe
what we believe to be true. Far from being the apolitical study of truth, epistemology
points to the ways in which power relations shape who is believed and
why. For example, various descendants of Sally Hemmings, a Black woman
owned by Thomas Jefferson, claimed repeatedly that Jefferson fathered her children.
These accounts forwarded by Jefferson’s African-American descendants
were ignored in favor of accounts advanced by his White progeny. Hemmings’s
descendants were routinely disbelieved until their knowledge claims were validated
by DNA testing.
Distinguishing among epistemologies, paradigms, and methodologies can
prove to be useful in understanding the significance of competing epistemologies
(Harding 1987). In contrast to epistemologies, paradigms encompass
interpretive frameworks such as intersectionality that are used to explain social
phenomena.1 Methodology refers to the broad principles of how to conduct
research and how interpretive paradigms are to be applied.2 The level of epistemology
is important because it determines which questions merit investigation,
which interpretive frameworks will be used to analyze findings, and to what use
any ensuing knowledge will be put.
In producing the specialized knowledge of U.S. Black feminist thought, Black
women intellectuals often encounter two distinct epistemologies: one representing
elite White male interests and the other expressing Black feminist concerns.
Whereas many variations of these epistemologies exist, it is possible to distill
some of their distinguishing features that transcend differences among the paradigms
within them. Epistemological choices about whom to trust, what to
believe, and why something is true are not benign academic issues. Instead, these
concerns tap the fundamental question of which versions of truth will prevail.
252 B L A C K F E M I N I S T T H O U G H T
Eu r o c ent r i c Knowl edge Va l ida t ion Pro c e s s e s and U.S.
Power Re l a t ions
In the United States, the social institutions that legitimate knowledge as well as
the Western or Eurocentric epistemologies that they uphold constitute two interrelated
parts of the dominant knowledge validation processes. In general, scholars,
publishers, and other experts represent specific interests and credentialing
processes, and their knowledge claims must satisfy the political and epistemological
criteria of the contexts in which they reside (Kuhn 1962; Mulkay 1979).
Because this enterprise is controlled by elite White men, knowledge validation
processes reflect this group’s interests.3 Although designed to represent and protect
the interests of powerful White men, neither schools, government, the
media and other social institutions that house these processes nor the actual
epistemologies that they promote need be managed by White men themselves.
White women, African-American men and women, and other people of color
may be enlisted to enforce these connections between power relations and what
counts as truth. Moreover, not all White men accept these power relations that
privilege Eurocentrism. Some have revolted and subverted social institutions and
the ideas they promote.
Two political criteria influence knowledge validation processes. First, knowledge
claims are evaluated by a group of experts whose members bring with them
a host of sedimented experiences that reflect their group location in intersecting
oppressions. No scholar can avoid cultural ideas and his or her placement in
intersecting oppressions of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation. In the United
States, this means that a scholar making a knowledge claim typically must convince
a scholarly community controlled by elite White avowedly heterosexual
men holding U.S. citizenship that a given claim is justified. Second, each community
of experts must maintain its credibility as defined by the larger population
in which it is situated and from which it draws its basic, taken-for-granted
knowledge. This means that scholarly communities that challenge basic beliefs
held in U.S. culture at large will be deemed less credible than those that support
popular ideas. For example, if scholarly communities stray too far from widely
held beliefs about Black womanhood, they run the risk of being discredited.
When elite White men or any other overly homogeneous group dominates
knowledge validation processes, both of these political criteria can work to suppress
Black feminist thought. Given that the general U.S. culture shaping the
taken-for-granted knowledge of the community of experts is permeated by
widespread notions of Black female inferiority, new knowledge claims that seem
to violate this fundamental assumption are likely to be viewed as anomalies
(Kuhn 1962). Moreover, specialized thought challenging notions of Black female
inferiority is unlikely to be generated from within White-male-controlled academic
settings because both the kinds of questions asked and the answers to them
B L A C K F E M I N I S T E P I S T E M O L O G Y 253
would necessarily reflect a basic lack of familiarity with Black women’s realities.
Even those who think they are familiar can reproduce stereotypes. Believing that
they are already knowledgeable, many scholars staunchly defend controlling
images of U.S. Black women as mammies, matriarchs, and jezebels, and allow
these commonsense beliefs to permeate their scholarship.
The experiences of African-American women scholars illustrate how individuals
who wish to rearticulate a Black women’s standpoint through Black feminist
thought can be suppressed by prevailing knowledge validation processes.
Exclusion from basic literacy, quality educational experiences, and faculty and
administrative positions has limited U.S. Black women’s access to influential academic
positions (Zinn et al. 1986; Moses 1989). Black women have long produced
knowledge claims that contested those advanced by elite White men. But
because Black women have been denied positions of authority, they often relied
on alternative knowledge validation processes to generate competing knowledge
claims. As a consequence, academic disciplines typically rejected such claims.
Moreover, any credentials controlled by White male academicians could then be
denied to Black women who used alternative standards on the grounds that Black
women’s work did not constitute credible research.
Black women with academic credentials who seek to exert the authority that
our status grants us to propose new knowledge claims about African-American
women face pressures to use our authority to help legitimate a system that devalues
and excludes the majority of Black women. When an outsider group—in
this case, African-American women—recognizes that the insider group—
namely, elite White men—requires special privileges from the larger society,
those in power must find ways of keeping the outsiders out and at the same time
having them acknowledge the legitimacy of this procedure. Accepting a few
“safe” outsiders addresses this legitimation problem (Berger and Luckmann
1966). One way of excluding the majority of Black women from the knowledge
validation process is to permit a few Black women to acquire positions of authority
in institutions that legitimate knowledge, and to encourage us to work within
the taken-for-granted assumptions of Black female inferiority shared by the
scholarly community and the culture at large. Those Black women who accept
these assumptions are likely to be rewarded by their institutions.Those challenging
the assumptions can be placed under surveillance and run the risk of being
ostracized.
African-American women academicians who persist in trying to rearticulate
a Black women’s standpoint also face potential rejection of our knowledge claims
on epistemological grounds. Just as the material realities of powerful and dominated
groups produce separate standpoints, these groups may also deploy distinctive
epistemologies or theories of knowledge. Black women scholars may
know that something is true—at least, by standards widely accepted among
African-American women—but be unwilling or unable to legitimate our claims
using prevailing scholarly norms. For any discourse, new knowledge claims must
254 B L A C K F E M I N I S T T H O U G H T
be consistent with an existing body of knowledge that the group controlling the
interpretive context accepts as true. Take, for example, the differences between
how U.S. Black women interpret their experiences as single mothers and how
prevailing social science research analyzes the same reality.Whereas Black women
stress their struggles with job discrimination, inadequate child support, inferior
housing, and street violence, far too much social science research seems mesmerized
by images of lazy “welfare queens” content to stay on the dole. The
methods used to validate knowledge claims must also be acceptable to the group
controlling the knowledge validation process. Individual African-American
women’s narratives about being single mothers are often rendered invisible in
quantitative research methodologies that erase individuality in favor of proving
patterns of welfare abuse. Thus, one important issue facing Black women intellectuals
is the question of what constitutes adequate justification that a given
knowledge claim, such as a fact or theory, is true. Just as Hemmings’s descendants
were routinely disbelieved, so are many Black women not seen as credible witnesses
for our own experiences. In this climate, Black women academics who
choose to believe other Black women can become suspect.
Criteria for methodological adequacy associated with positivism illustrate
the standards that Black women scholars, especially those in the social sciences,
would have to satisfy in legitimating Black feminist thought. Though I describe
Western or Eurocentric epistemologies as a single cluster, many interpretive
frameworks or paradigms are subsumed under this category. Moreover, my focus
on positivism should be interpreted neither to mean that all dimensions of positivism
are inherently problematic for Black women nor that nonpositivist frameworks
are better.
Positivist approaches aim to create scientific descriptions of reality by producing
objective generalizations. Because researchers have widely differing values,
experiences, and emotions, genuine science is thought to be unattainable unless
all human characteristics except rationality are eliminated from the research
process. By following strict methodological rules, scientists aim to distance
themselves from the values, vested interests, and emotions generated by their
class, race, sex, or unique situation. By decontextualizing themselves, they
allegedly become detached observers and manipulators of nature (Jaggar 1983;
Harding 1986).
Several requirements typify positivist methodological approaches. First,
research methods generally require a distancing of the researcher from her or his
“object” of study by defining the researcher as a “subject” with full human subjectivity
and by objectifying the “object” of study (Keller 1985; Asante 1987). A
second requirement is the absence of emotions from the research process (Jaggar
1983).Third, ethics and values are deemed inappropriate in the research process,
either as the reason for scientific inquiry or as part of the research process itself
(Richards 1980). Finally, adversarial debates, whether written or oral, become
the preferred method of ascertaining truth: The arguments that can withstand the
B L A C K F E M I N I S T E P I S T E M O L O G Y 255
greatest assault and survive intact become the strongest truths (Moulton 1983).
Such criteria ask African-American women to objectify ourselves, devalue
our emotional life, displace our motivations for furthering knowledge about
Black women, and confront in an adversarial relationship those with more social,
economic, and professional power. On the one hand, it seems unlikely that Black
women would rely exclusively on positivist paradigms in rearticulating a Black
women’s standpoint. For example, Black women’s experiences in sociology illustrate
diverse responses to encountering an entrenched positivism. Given Black
women’s long-standing exclusion from sociology prior to 1970, the sociological
knowledge about race and gender produced during their absence, and the symbolic
importance of Black women’s absence to sociological self-definitions as a
science, African-American women acting as agents of knowledge faced a complex
situation. In order to refute the history of Black women’s unsuitability for science,
they had to invoke the tools of sociology by using positivistic frameworks
to demonstrate their capability as scientists. However, they simultaneously needed
to challenge the same structure that granted them legitimacy. Their responses to
this dilemma reflect the strategic use of the tools of positivism when needed,
coupled with overt challenges to positivism when that seemed feasible (Collins
1998a, 95–123).
On the other hand, many Black women have had access to another epistemology
that encompasses standards for assessing truth that are widely accepted
among African-American women. An experiential, material base underlies a
Black feminist epistemology, namely, collective experiences and accompanying
worldviews that U.S. Black women sustained based on our particular history (see
Chapter 3). The historical conditions of Black women’s work, both in Black civil
society and in paid employment, fostered a series of experiences that when
shared and passed on become the collective wisdom of a Black women’s standpoint.
Moreover, a set of principles for assessing knowledge claims may be available
to those having these shared experiences. These principles pass into a more
general Black women’s wisdom and, further, into what I call here a Black feminist
epistemology.
This alternative epistemology uses different standards that are consistent
with Black women’s criteria for substantiated knowledge and with our criteria
for methodological adequacy. Certainly this alternative Black feminist epistemology
has been devalued by dominant knowledge validation processes and may
not be claimed by many African-American women. But if such an epistemology
exists, what are its contours? Moreover, what are its actual and potential contributions
to Black feminist thought?
256 B L A C K F E M I N I S T T H O U G H T
L i v e d E x p e r i e n c e a s a C r i t e r i o n o f Meaning
“My aunt used to say, ‘A heap see, but a few know,’” remembers Carolyn Chase, a
31-year-old inner-city Black woman (Gwaltney 1980, 83).This saying depicts two
types of knowing—knowledge and wisdom—and taps the first dimension of
Black feminist epistemology. Living life as Black women requires wisdom
because knowledge about the dynamics of intersecting oppressions has been
essential to U.S. Black women’s survival. African-American women give such
wisdom high credence in assessing knowledge.
Allusions to these two types of knowing pervade the words of a range of
African-American women. Zilpha Elaw, a preacher of the mid-1800s, explains
the tenacity of racism: “The pride of a white skin is a bauble of great value with
many in some parts of the United States, who readily sacrifice their intelligence
to their prejudices, and possess more knowledge than wisdom” (Andrews 1986,
85). In describing differences separating African-American and White women,
Nancy White invokes a similar rule: “When you come right down to it, white
women just think they are free. Black women know they ain’t free” (Gwaltney
1980, 147). Geneva Smitherman, a college professor specializing in African-
American linguistics, suggests, “From a black perspective, written documents are
limited in what they can teach about life and survival in the world. Blacks are
quick to ridicule ‘educated fools,’ . . . they have ‘book learning’ but no ‘mother
wit,’ knowledge, but not wisdom” (Smitherman 1977, 76). Mabel Lincoln eloquently
summarizes the distinction between knowledge and wisdom: “To black
people like me, a fool is funny—you know, people who love to break bad, people
you can’t tell anything to, folks that would take a shotgun to a roach”
(Gwaltney 1980, 68).
African-American women need wisdom to know how to deal with the
“educated fools” who would “take a shotgun to a roach.” As members of a subordinate
group, Black women cannot afford to be fools of any type, for our
objectification as the Other denies us the protections that White skin, maleness,
and wealth confer.This distinction between knowledge and wisdom, and the use
of experience as the cutting edge dividing them, has been key to Black women’s
survival. In the context of intersecting oppressions, the distinction is essential.
Knowledge without wisdom is adequate for the powerful, but wisdom is essential
to the survival of the subordinate.
For most African-American women those individuals who have lived
through the experiences about which they claim to be experts are more believable
and credible than those who have merely read or thought about such experiences.
Thus lived experience as a criterion for credibility frequently is invoked
by U.S. Black women when making knowledge claims. For instance, Hannah
Nelson describes the importance that personal experience has for her: “Our
speech is most directly personal, and every black person assumes that every other
black person has a right to a personal opinion. In speaking of grave matters, your
B L A C K F E M I N I S T E P I S T E M O L O G Y 257
personal experience is considered very good evidence.With us, distant statistics
are certainly not as important as the actual experience of a sober person”
(Gwaltney 1980, 7). Similarly, Ruth Shays uses her lived experiences to challenge
the idea that formal education is the only route to knowledge: “I am the kind of
person who doesn’t have a lot of education, but both my mother and my father
had good common sense. Now, I think that’s all you need. I might not know how
to use thirty-four words where three would do, but that does not mean that I
don’t know what I’m talking about. . . . I know what I’m talking about because
I’m talking about myself. I’m talking about what I have lived” (Gwaltney 1980,
27, 33). Implicit in Ms. Shays’s self-assessment is a critique of the type of knowledge
that obscures the truth, the “thirty-four words” that cover up a truth that
can be expressed in three.
Even after substantial mastery of dominant epistemologies, many Black
women scholars invoke our own lived experiences and those of other African-
American women in selecting topics for investigation and methodologies used.
For example, Elsa Barkley Brown (1986) subtitles her essay on Black women’s
history “How My Mother Taught Me to Be an Historian in spite of My Academic
Training.” Similarly, Joyce Ladner (1972) maintains that growing up as a Black
woman in the South gave her special insights in conducting her study of Black
adolescent women.
Experience as a criterion of meaning with practical images as its symbolic
vehicles is a fundamental epistemological tenet in African-American thought systems
(Mitchell and Lewter 1986). “Look at my arm!” Sojourner Truth proclaimed:
“I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man
could head me! And ain’t I a woman?” (Loewenberg and Bogin 1976, 235). By
invoking examples from her own life to symbolize new meanings,Truth deconstructed
the prevailing notions of woman. Stories, narratives, and Bible principles
are selected for their applicability to the lived experiences of African-Americans
and become symbolic representations of a whole wealth of experience. Bible
tales are often told for the wisdom they express about everyday life, so their interpretation
involves no need for scientific historical verification. The narrative
method requires that the story be told, not torn apart in analysis, and trusted as
core belief, not “admired as science” (Mitchell and Lewter 1986, 8).
June Jordan’s essay about her mother’s suicide illustrates the multiple levels
of meaning that can occur when lived experience becomes valued as a criterion
of meaning. Jordan describes her mother, a woman who literally died trying to
stand up, and the effect her mother’s death had on her own work:
I think all of this is really about women and work. Certainly this is all
about me as a woman and my life work. I mean I am not sure my mother’s
suicide was something extraordinary. Perhaps most women must deal
with a similar inheritance, the legacy of a woman whose death you cannot
possibly pinpoint because she died so many, many times and because,
even before she became your mother, the life of that woman was taken. . . .
258 B L A C K F E M I N I S T T H O U G H T
I came too late to help my mother to her feet. By way of everlasting thanks
to all of the women who have helped me to stay alive I am working never
to be late again. (Jordan 1985, 26)
While Jordan has knowledge about the concrete act of her mother’s death, she
also strives for wisdom concerning the meaning of that death.
Some feminist scholars claim that women as a group are more likely than
men to use lived experiences in assessing knowledge claims. For example, a substantial
number of the 135 women in a study of women’s cognitive development
were “connected knowers” and were drawn to the sort of knowledge that
emerges from firsthand observation (Belenky et al. 1986). Such women felt that
because knowledge comes from experience, the best way of understanding
another person’s ideas was to develop empathy and share the experiences that led
the person to form those ideas. In explaining these patterns, some feminist theorists
suggest that women are socialized in complex relational nexuses where
contextual rules versus abstract principles govern behavior (Chodorow 1978;
Gilligan 1982). This socialization process is thought to stimulate characteristic
ways of knowing (Hartsock 1983a; Belenky et al. 1986). These theorists suggest
that women are more likely to experience two modes of knowing: one located
in the body and the space it occupies and the other passing beyond it. Through
multiple forms of mothering, women mediate these two modes and use the lived
experiences of their daily lives to assess more abstract knowledge claims (D.
Smith 1987). These forms of knowledge allow for subjectivity between the
knower and the known, rest in the women themselves (not in higher authorities),
and are experienced directly in the world (not through abstractions).
African-American women’s lives remain structured at the convergence of
several factors: Black community organizations reflecting principles of Africaninfluenced
belief systems; activist mothering traditions that stimulate politicized
understandings of Black women’s motherwork; and a social class system that relegates
Black women as workers to the bottom of the social hierarchy. Amanda
King, a young African-American mother whose experiences illustrate this convergence,
describes how she used lived experience to assess the abstract and
points out how difficult mediating these two modes of knowing can be:
The leaders of the ROC [a labor union] lost their jobs too, but it just
seemed like they were used to losing their jobs. . . .This was like a lifelong
thing for them, to get out there and protest. They were like, what do you
call them—intellectuals. . . .You got the ones that go to the university that
are supposed to make all the speeches, they’re the ones that are supposed
to lead, you know, put this little revolution together, and then you got the
little ones . . . that go to the factory everyday, they be the ones that have to
fight. I had a child and I thought I don’t have the time to be running
around with these people. . . . I mean I understand some of that stuff they
were talking about, like the bourgeoisie, the rich and the poor and all that,
but I had surviving on my mind for me and my kid. (Byerly 1986, 198)
B L A C K F E M I N I S T E P I S T E M O L O G Y 259
For Ms. King abstract ideals of class solidarity were mediated by her lived experiences
as a mother and the connectedness it involved.
In traditional African-American communities Black women find considerable
institutional support for valuing lived experience. Black women’s centrality
in families, churches, and other community organizations allows us to share with
younger, less experienced sisters our concrete knowledge of what it takes to be
self-defined Black women. “Sisterhood is not new to Black women,” asserts
Bonnie Thornton Dill, but “while Black women have fostered and encouraged sisterhood,
we have not used it as the anvil to forge our political identities” (1983,
134). Though not expressed in explicitly political terms, this relationship of sisterhood
among Black women can be seen as a model for a series of relationships
African-American women have with one another (Gilkes 1985; Giddings 1988).
Given that Black churches and families are often woman-centered, Africaninfluenced
institutions, African-American women traditionally have found considerable
institutional support for this dimension of Black feminist epistemology.
While White women may value lived experience, it is questionable whether comparable
support comes from White families—particularly middle-class families
where privatization is so highly valued—and other social institutions controlled
by Whites that advance similar values. Similarly, while Black men participate in
the institutions of Black civil society, they cannot take part in Black women’s sisterhood.
In terms of Black women’s relationships with one another, African-
American women may find it easier than others to recognize connectedness as a
primary way of knowing, simply because we have more opportunities to do so
and must rely upon it more heavily than others.
Th e Us e of Di a logue in As s e s s ing
Knowl edge Cl a ims
“Dialogue implies talk between two subjects, not the speech of subject and
object. It is a humanizing speech, one that challenges and resists domination,”
asserts bell hooks (1989, 131). For Black women new knowledge claims are
rarely worked out in isolation from other individuals and are usually developed
through dialogues with other members of a community. A primary epistemological
assumption underlying the use of dialogue in assessing knowledge
claims is that connectedness rather than separation is an essential component of
the knowledge validation process (Belenky et al. 1986, 18).
This belief in connectedness and the use of dialogue as one of its criteria for
methodological adequacy has African roots. Whereas women typically remain
subordinated to men within traditional African societies, these same societies
have at the same time embraced holistic worldviews that seek harmony. “One
must understand that to become human, to realize the promise of becoming
human, is the only important task of the person,” posits Molefi Asante (1987,
260 B L A C K F E M I N I S T T H O U G H T
185). People become more human and empowered primarily in the context of
a community, and only when they “become seekers of the type of connections,
interactions, and meetings that lead to harmony” (p. 185). The power of the
word generally, and dialogues specifically, allows this to happen.
Not to be confused with adversarial debate, the use of dialogue has deep
roots in African-based oral traditions and in African-American culture (Sidran
1971; Smitherman 1977; Kochman 1981). Ruth Shays describes the importance
of dialogue in the knowledge validation process of enslaved African-Americans:
They would find a lie if it took them a year. . . .The foreparents found the
truth because they listened and they made people tell their part many
times. Most often you can hear a lie. . . .Those old people was everywhere
and knew the truth of many disputes.They believed that a liar should suffer
the pain of his lies, and they had all kinds of ways of bringing liars to
judgment. (Gwaltney 1980, 32)
The widespread use of the call-and-response discourse mode among African-
Americans illustrates the importance placed on dialogue. Composed of spontaneous
verbal and nonverbal interaction between speaker and listener in which
all of the speaker’s statements, or “calls,” are punctuated by expressions, or
“responses,” from the listener, this Black discourse mode pervades African-
American culture. The fundamental requirement of this interactive network is
active participation of all individuals (Smitherman 1977, 108). For ideas to be
tested and validated, everyone in the group must participate.To refuse to join in,
especially if one really disagrees with what has been said, is seen as “cheating”
(Kochman 1981, 28).
June Jordan’s analysis of Black English points to the significance of this
dimension of an alternative epistemology:
Our language is a system constructed by people constantly needing to
insist that we exist. . . . Our language devolves from a culture that abhors
all abstraction, or anything tending to obscure or delete the fact of the
human being who is here and now/the truth of the person who is speaking
or listening. Consequently, there is no passive voice construction possible
in Black English. For example, you cannot say,“Black English is being eliminated.”
You must say, instead, “White people eliminating Black English.”
The assumption of the presence of life governs all of Black English . . .
every sentence assumes the living and active participation of at least two
human beings, the speaker and the listener. (Jordan 1985, 129)
Many Black women intellectuals invoke the relationships and connectedness
provided by use of dialogue. When asked why she chose the themes she did,
novelist Gayl Jones replied: “I was . . . interested . . . in oral traditions of storytelling—
Afro-American and others, in which there is always the consciousness
and importance of the hearer” (Tate 1983, 91). In describing the difference in
the way male and female writers select significant events and relationships, Jones
B L A C K F E M I N I S T E P I S T E M O L O G Y 261
says “With many women writers, relationships within family, community,
between men and women, and among women—from slave narratives by black
women writers on—are treated as complex and significant relationships, whereas
with many men the significant relationships are those that involve confrontations—
relationships outside the family and community” (in Tate 1983, 92).
Alice Walker’s reaction to Zora Neale Hurston’s book Mules and Men is another
example of the use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims. In Mules and Men
Hurston chose not to become a detached observer of the stories and folktales
she collected but instead, through extensive dialogues with the people in the
communities she studied, placed herself in the center of her analysis. Using a
similar process,Walker tests the truth of Hurston’s knowledge claims:
When I read Mules and Men I was delighted. Here was this perfect book!
The “perfection” of which I immediately tested on my relatives, who are
such typical Black Americans they are useful for every sort of political, cultural,
or economic survey.Very regular people from the South, rapidly forgetting
their Southern cultural inheritance in the suburbs and ghettos of
Boston and New York, they sat around reading the book themselves, listening
to me read the book, listening to each other read the book, and a
kind of paradise was regained. (Walker 1977, xii)
Black women’s centrality in families, churches, and other community organizations
provides African-American women with a high degree of support for
invoking dialogue as a dimension of Black feminist epistemology. However,
when African-American women use dialogues in assessing knowledge claims,
we might be invoking ways of knowing that are also more likely to be used
by women. Feminist scholars contend that men and women are socialized to
seek different types of autonomy—the former based on separation, the latter
seeking connectedness—and that this variation in types of autonomy parallels
the characteristic differences between how men and women understand ideas
and experiences (Chodorow 1978; Keller 1985; Belenky et al. 1986). For
instance, in contrast to the visual metaphors (such as equating knowledge with
illumination, knowing with seeing, and truth with light) that scientists and
philosophers typically use, women tend to ground their epistemological
premises in metaphors suggesting finding a voice, speaking, and listening
(Belenky et al. 1986).
Th e E thi c s of Ca r ing
“Ole white preachers used to talk wid dey tongues widdout sayin’ nothin’, but
Jesus told us slaves to talk wid our hearts” (Webber 1978, 127).These words of
an ex-slave suggest that ideas cannot be divorced from the individuals who create
and share them.This theme of talking with the heart taps the ethic of caring,
another dimension of an alternative epistemology used by African-American
262 B L A C K F E M I N I S T T H O U G H T
women. Just as the ex-slave used the wisdom in his heart to reject the ideas of
the preachers who talked “wid dey tongues widdout sayin’ nothin’,” the ethic
of caring suggests that personal expressiveness, emotions, and empathy are central
to the knowledge validation process.
One of three interrelated components of the ethic of caring is the emphasis
placed on individual uniqueness. Rooted in a tradition of African humanism,
each individual is thought to be a unique expression of a common spirit, power,
or energy inherent in all life.4 When Alice Walker “never doubted her powers of
judgment because her mother assumed they were sound,” she invokes the sense
of individual uniqueness taught to her by her mother (Washington 1984, 145).
The polyrhythms in African-American music, in which no one main beat subordinates
the others, is paralleled by the theme of individual expression in Black
women’s quilting. Black women quilters place strong color and patterns next to
one another and see the individual differences not as detracting from each piece
but as enriching the whole quilt (Brown 1989).This belief in individual uniqueness
is illustrated by the value placed on personal expressiveness in African-
American communities (Smitherman 1977; Kochman 1981; Mitchell and Lewter
1986). Johnetta Ray, an inner-city resident, describes this African-influenced
emphasis on individual uniqueness: “No matter how hard we try, I don’t think
black people will ever develop much of a herd instinct.We are profound individualists
with a passion for self-expression” (Gwaltney 1980, 228).
A second component of the ethic of caring concerns the appropriateness of
emotions in dialogues. Emotion indicates that a speaker believes in the validity of
an argument. Consider Ntozake Shange’s description of one of the goals of her
work: “Our [Western] society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally
out of touch with their feelings and everyone else’s feelings, and yet be very
respectable. This, to me, is a travesty. . . . I’m trying to change the idea of seeing
emotions and intellect as distinct faculties” (Tate 1983, 156).The Black women’s
blues tradition’s history of personal expressiveness heals this binary that separates
emotion from intellect. For example, in her rendition of “Strange Fruit,” Billie
Holiday’s lyrics blend seamlessly with the emotion of her delivery to render a
trenchant social commentary on Southern lynching. Without emotion, Aretha
Franklin’s (1967) cry for “respect” would be virtually meaningless.
A third component of the ethic of caring involves developing the capacity for
empathy. Harriet Jones, a 16-year-old Black woman, explains to her interviewer
why she chose to open up to him: “Some things in my life are so hard for me to
bear, and it makes me feel better to know that you feel sorry about those things
and would change them if you could” (Gwaltney 1980, 11).Without her belief
in his empathy, she found it difficult to talk. Black women writers often explore
the growth of empathy as part of an ethic of caring. For example, the growing
respect that the Black slave woman Dessa and the White woman Rufel gain for
each other in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose stems from their increased
understanding of each other’s positions. After watching Rufel fight off the
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advances of a White man, Dessa lay awake thinking: “The white woman was subject
to the same ravisment as me; this the thought that kept me awake. I hadn’t
knowed white mens could use a white woman like that, just take her by force
same as they could with us” (1986, 220). As a result of her newfound empathy,
Dessa observed, “It was like we had a secret between us” (p. 220).
These components of the ethic of caring—the value placed on individual
expressiveness, the appropriateness of emotions, and the capacity for empathy—
reappear in varying combinations throughout Black civil society. One of the best
examples of the interactive nature of the importance of dialogue and the ethic of
caring in assessing knowledge claims occurs in the use of the call-and-response
discourse mode in many Black church services. In such services both the minister
and the congregation routinely use voice rhythm and vocal inflection to convey
meaning. The sound of what is being said is just as important as the words
themselves in what is, in a sense, a dialogue of reason and emotion. As a result it
is nearly impossible to filter out the strictly linguistic-cognitive abstract meaning
from the sociocultural psychoemotive meaning (Smitherman 1977, 135, 137).
While the ideas presented by a speaker must have validity (i.e., agree with the
general body of knowledge shared by the Black congregation), the group also
appraises the way knowledge claims are presented.
The emphasis placed on expressiveness and emotion in African-American
communities bears marked resemblance to feminist perspectives on the importance
of personality in connected knowing. Belenky et al. (1986) point out that
two contrasting orientations characterize knowing: one of separation based on
impersonal procedures for establishing truth, and the other of connection in
which truth emerges through care. While these ways of knowing are not gender
specific, disproportionate numbers of women rely on connected knowing.
Separate knowers try to subtract the personality of an individual from his or her
ideas because they see personality as biasing those ideas. In contrast, connected
knowers see personality as adding to an individual’s ideas and feel that the
personality of each group member enriches a group’s understanding. The significance
of individual uniqueness, personal expressiveness, and empathy in
African-American communities thus resembles the importance that some
feminist analyses place on women’s “inner voice” (Belenky et al. 1986).
The convergence of African-influenced and feminist principles in the ethic
of caring seems particularly acute. White women may have access to women’s
experiences that encourage emotion and expressiveness, but few White-controlled
U.S. social institutions except the family validate this way of knowing. In
contrast, Black women have long had the support of the Black church, an institution
with deep roots in the African past and a philosophy that accepts and
encourages expressiveness and an ethic of caring. Black men share in this Black
cultural tradition. But they must resolve the contradictions that confront them in
redefining Black masculinity in the face of abstract, unemotional notions of masculinity
imposed on them (Hoch 1979).Thus, the differences distinguishing U.S.
264 B L A C K F E M I N I S T T H O U G H T
Black women from other groups, even those close to them, lies less in Black
women’s race or gender identity than in access to social institutions that support
an ethic of caring in their lives.
Th e E thi c of Per sona l Ac count abi l i t y
An ethic of personal accountability also characterizes Black feminist epistemology.
Not only must individuals develop their knowledge claims through dialogue and
present them in a style proving their concern for their ideas, but people are
expected to be accountable for their knowledge claims. Zilpha Elaw’s description
of slavery reflects this notion that every idea has an owner and that the owner’s
identity matters: “Oh, the abominations of slavery! . . . Every case of slavery, however
lenient its inflictions and mitigated its atrocities, indicates an oppressor, the
oppressed, and oppression” (Andrews 1986, 98). For Elaw abstract definitions of
slavery mesh with the personal identities of slavery’s perpetrators and its victims.
African-Americans consider it essential for individuals to have definite positions
on issues and assume full responsibility for arguing their validity (Kochman 1981).
Assessments of an individual’s knowledge claims simultaneously evaluate an
individual’s character, values, and ethics. Within this logic, many African-
Americans reject prevailing beliefs that probing into an individual’s personal
viewpoint is outside the boundaries of discussion. Rather, all views expressed and
actions taken are thought to derive from a central set of core beliefs that cannot
be other than personal (Kochman 1981, 23). “Does Aretha really believe that
Black women should get ‘respect,’ or is she just mouthing the words?” is a valid
question in Black feminist epistemology. Knowledge claims made by individuals
respected for their moral and ethical connections to their ideas will carry more
weight than those offered by less respected figures.
An example drawn from an undergraduate class session where the students
were all Black women illustrates the uniqueness of this portion of the knowledge
validation process. During one class discussion I asked the students to evaluate a
prominent Black male scholar’s analysis of Black feminism. Instead of removing
the scholar from his context in order to dissect the rationality of his thesis, my
students demanded facts about the author’s personal biography. They were especially
interested in specific details of his life, such as his relationships with Black
women, his marital status, and his social class background. By requesting data on
dimensions of his personal life routinely excluded in positivist approaches to
knowledge validation, they invoked lived experience as a criterion of meaning.
They used this information to assess whether he really cared about his topic and
drew on this ethic of caring in advancing their knowledge claims about his work.
Furthermore, they refused to evaluate the rationality of his written ideas without
some indication of his personal credibility as an ethical human being. The entire
exchange could only have occurred as a dialogue among members of a group
B L A C K F E M I N I S T E P I S T E M O L O G Y 265
that had established a solid enough community to employ an alternative epistemology
in assessing knowledge claims.
Traditional Black church services also illustrate the interactive nature of all
four dimensions of this alternative epistemology. The services represent more
than dialogues between the rationality used in examining biblical texts and stories
and the emotion inherent in the use of reason for this purpose. The reason
such dialogues exist is to examine lived experiences for the presence of an ethic
of caring. Neither emotion nor ethics is subordinated to reason. Instead, emotion,
ethics, and reason are used as interconnected, essential components in
assessing knowledge claims. In this alternative epistemology, values lie at the
heart of the knowledge validation process such that inquiry always has an ethical
aim. Moreover, when these four dimensions become politicized and attached
to a social justice project, they can form a framework for Black feminist thought
and practice.
B l a c k Women a s A g e n t s o f Knowledge
Social movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s stimulated a greatly changed
intellectual and political climate in the United States. Compared to the past,
many more U.S. Black women became legitimated agents of knowledge. No
longer passive objects of knowledge manipulated within prevailing knowledge
validation processes, African-American women aimed to speak for ourselves.
African-American women in the academy and other positions of authority
who aim to advance Black feminist thought now encounter the often conflicting
epistemological standards of three key groups. First, Black feminist thought must
be validated by ordinary African-American women who, in the words of Hannah
Nelson, grow to womanhood “in a world where the saner you are, the madder
you are made to appear” (Gwaltney 1980, 7). To be credible in the eyes of this
group, Black feminist intellectuals must be personal advocates for their material,
be accountable for the consequences of their work, have lived or experienced
their material in some fashion, and be willing to engage in dialogues about their
findings with ordinary, everyday people.
Historically, living life as an African-American woman facilitated this endeavor
because knowledge validation processes controlled in part or in full by Black
women occurred in particular organizational settings.When Black women were
in charge of our own self-definitions, these four dimensions of Black feminist
epistemology—lived experience as a criterion of meaning, the use of dialogue,
the ethic of personal accountability, and the ethic of caring—came to the forefront.
When the core themes and interpretive frameworks of Black women’s
knowledge were informed by Black feminist epistemology, a rich tradition of
Black feminist thought ensued.
Traditionally women engaged in this overarching intellectual and political
266 B L A C K F E M I N I S T T H O U G H T
project were blues singers, poets, autobiographers, storytellers, and orators.They
became Black feminist intellectuals both by doing intellectual work and by being
validated as such by everyday Black women. Black women in academia could not
openly join their ranks without incurring a serious penalty. In racially segregated
environments that routinely excluded the majority of African-American women,
only a select few were able to defy prevailing norms and explicitly embrace Black
feminist epistemology. Zora Neale Hurston was one such figure. Consider Alice
Walker’s description of Hurston:
In my mind, Zora Neale Hurston, Billie Holiday, and Bessie Smith form a
sort of unholy trinity. Zora belongs in the tradition of black women singers,
rather than among “the literati.” . . . Like Billie and Bessie she followed her
own road, believed in her own gods, pursued her own dreams, and
refused to separate herself from “common” people. (Walker 1977,
xvii–xviii)
For her time, Zora Neale Hurston remains an exception, for prior to 1950, few
African-American women earned advanced degrees, and most of those who did
complied with prevailing knowledge validation processes.
The community of Black women scholars constitutes a second constituency
whose epistemological standards must be met. As the number of Black women
academics grows, this heterogeneous collectivity shares a similar social location
in higher education, yet finds a new challenge in building group solidarities
across differences. African-American women scholars place varying amounts of
importance on furthering Black feminist scholarship. However, despite this newfound
diversity, since more African-American women earn advanced degrees, the
range of Black feminist scholarship has expanded. Historically, African-American
women may have brought sensibilities gained from Black feminist epistemology
to their scholarship. But gaining legitimacy often came with the cost of rejecting
such an epistemology. Studying Black women’s lives at all placed many careers at
risk. More recently, increasing numbers of African-American women scholars
have chosen to study Black women’s experiences, and to do so by relying on elements
of Black feminist epistemology in framing their work. For example,Valerie
Lee’s (1996) study of African-American midwives in the South deploys an innovative
merger of Black women’s fiction, ethnographic method, and personal narrative,
to good effect.
A third group whose epistemological standards must be met consists of
dominant groups who still control schools, graduate programs, tenure processes,
publication outlets, and other mechanisms that legitimate knowledge.
African-American women academics who aim to advance Black feminist thought
typically must use dominant Eurocentric epistemologies for this group. The difficulties
these Black women now face lie less in demonstrating that they could
master White male epistemologies than in resisting the hegemonic nature of
these patterns of thought in order to see, value, and use existing alternative Black
B L A C K F E M I N I S T E P I S T E M O L O G Y 267
feminist ways of knowing. For Black women who are agents of knowledge within
academia, the marginality that accompanies outsider-within status can be the
source of both frustration and creativity. In an attempt to minimize the differences
between the cultural context of African-American communities and the
expectations of mainstream social institutions, some women dichotomize their
behavior and become two different people. Over time, the strain of doing this
can be enormous. Others reject Black women’s accumulated wisdom and work
against their own best interests by enforcing the dominant group’s specialized
thought. Still others manage to inhabit both contexts but do so critically, using
perspectives gained from their outsider-within social locations as a source of
insights and ideas. But while such women can make substantial contributions as
agents of knowledge, they rarely do so without substantial personal cost.
“Eventually it comes to you,” observes Lorraine Hansberry, “the thing that makes
you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you
lonely” (1969, 148).
Just as migrating between Black and White families raised special issues for
Black women domestic workers, moving among different and competing interpretive
communities raises similar epistemological concerns for Black feminist
thinkers. The dilemma facing Black women scholars, in particular, engaged in
creating Black feminist thought illustrates difficulties that can accompany grappling
with multiple interpretive communities. A knowledge claim that meets the
criteria of adequacy for one group and thus is judged to be acceptable may not
be translatable into the terms of a different group. Using the example of Black
English, June Jordan illustrates the difficulty of moving among epistemologies:
You cannot “translate” instances of Standard English preoccupied with
abstraction or with nothing/nobody evidently alive into Black English.
That would warp the language into uses antithetical to the guiding perspective
of its community of users. Rather you must first change those
Standard English sentences, themselves, into ideas consistent with the person-
centered assumptions of Black English. (Jordan 1985, 130)
Although both worldviews share a common vocabulary, the ideas themselves
defy direct translation.
Once Black women scholars face the notion that on certain dimensions of a
Black women’s standpoint, it may be fruitless to try to translate into other frameworks
truths validated by Black feminist epistemology, then other choices
emerge. Rather than trying to uncover universal knowledge claims that can withstand
the translation from one epistemology to another (initially, at least), Black
women intellectuals might find efforts to rearticulate a Black women’s standpoint
especially fruitful. Rearticulating a Black women’s standpoint refashions the particular
and reveals the more universal human dimensions of Black women’s
everyday lives. “I date all my work,” notes Nikki Giovanni, “because I think poetry,
or any writing, is but a reflection of the moment. The universal comes from the
268 B L A C K F E M I N I S T T H O U G H T
particular” (1988, 57). Lorraine Hansberry expresses a similar idea: “I believe
that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the
universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think,
emerges from the truthful identity of what is” (1969, 128).
Towa rd Tr u t h
The existence of Black feminist thought suggests another path to the universal
truths that might accompany the “truthful identity of what is.” In this volume I
place Black women’s subjectivity in the center of analysis and examine the interdependence
of the everyday, taken-for-granted knowledge shared by African-
American women as a group, the more specialized knowledge produced by
Black women intellectuals, and the social conditions shaping both types of
thought. This approach allows me to describe the creative tension linking how
social conditions influenced a Black women’s standpoint and how the power of
the ideas themselves gave many African-American women the strength to shape
those same social conditions. I approach Black feminist thought as situated in a
context of domination and not as a system of ideas divorced from political and
economic reality. Moreover, I present Black feminist thought as subjugated
knowledge in that African-American women have long struggled to find alternative
locations and epistemologies for validating our own self-definitions. In
brief, I examined the situated, subjugated standpoint of African-American
women in order to understand Black feminist thought as a partial perspective on
domination.
Because U.S. Black women have access to the experiences that accrue to being
both Black and female, an alternative epistemology used to rearticulate a Black
women’s standpoint should reflect the convergence of both sets of experiences.
Race and gender may be analytically distinct, but in Black women’s everyday
lives, they work together. The search for the distinguishing features of an alternative
epistemology used by African-American women reveals that some ideas
that Africanist scholars identify as characteristically “Black” often bear remarkable
resemblance to similar ideas claimed by feminist scholars as characteristically
“female.” This similarity suggests that the actual contours of intersecting oppressions
can vary dramatically and yet generate some uniformity in the epistemologies
used by subordinate groups. Just as U.S. Black women and African women
encountered diverse patterns of intersecting oppressions yet generated similar
agendas concerning what mattered in their feminisms, a similar process may be
at work regarding the epistemologies of oppressed groups.Thus the significance
of a Black feminist epistemology may lie in its ability to enrich our understanding
of how subordinate groups create knowledge that fosters both their empowerment
and social justice.
This approach to Black feminist thought allows African-American women to
B L A C K F E M I N I S T E P I S T E M O L O G Y 269
explore the epistemological implications of transversal politics.. Eventually this
approach may get us to a point at which, claims Elsa Barkley Brown, “all people
can learn to center in another experience, validate it, and judge it by its own standards
without need of comparison or need to adopt that framework as their
own” (1989, 922). In such politics, “one has no need to ‘decenter’ anyone in
order to center someone else; one has only to constantly, appropriately, ‘pivot the
center’ ” (p. 922).
Rather than emphasizing how a Black women’s standpoint and its accompanying
epistemology differ from those of White women, Black men, and other
collectivities, Black women’s experiences serve as one specific social location for
examining points of connection among multiple epistemologies. Viewing Black
feminist epistemology in this way challenges additive analyses of oppression
claiming that Black women have a more accurate view of oppression than do
other groups. Such approaches suggest that oppression can be quantified and
compared and that adding layers of oppression produces a potentially clearer
standpoint (Spelman 1988). One implication of some uses of standpoint theory
is that the more subordinated the group, the purer the vision available to them.
This is an outcome of the origins of standpoint approaches in Marxist social theory,
itself reflecting the binary thinking of its Western origins. Ironically, by quantifying
and ranking human oppressions, standpoint theorists invoke criteria for
methodological adequacy that resemble those of positivism. Although it is tempting
to claim that Black women are more oppressed than everyone else and therefore
have the best standpoint from which to understand the mechanisms,
processes, and effects of oppression, this is not the case.
Instead, those ideas that are validated as true by African-American women,
African-American men, Latina lesbians, Asian-American women, Puerto Rican
men, and other groups with distinctive standpoints, with each group using the
epistemological approaches growing from its unique standpoint, become the
most “objective” truths. Each group speaks from its own standpoint and shares
its own partial, situated knowledge. But because each group perceives its own
truth as partial, its knowledge is unfinished. Each group becomes better able to
consider other groups’ standpoints without relinquishing the uniqueness of its
own standpoint or suppressing other groups’ partial perspectives. “What is
always needed in the appreciation of art, or life,” maintains Alice Walker, “is the
larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed
before, the straining to encompass in one’s glance at the varied world the common
thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity” (1983, 5).
Partiality, and not universality, is the condition of being heard; individuals and
groups forwarding knowledge claims without owning their position are deemed
less credible than those who do.
Alternative knowledge claims in and of themselves are rarely threatening to
conventional knowledge. Such claims are routinely ignored, discredited, or simply
absorbed and marginalized in existing paradigms. Much more threatening is
270 B L A C K F E M I N I S T T H O U G H T
the challenge that alternative epistemologies offer to the basic process used by
the powerful to legitimate knowledge claims that in turn justify their right to
rule. If the epistemology used to validate knowledge comes into question, then
all prior knowledge claims validated under the dominant model become suspect.
Alternative epistemologies challenge all certified knowledge and open up the
question of whether what has been taken to be true can stand the test of alternative
ways of validating truth. The existence of a self-defined Black women’s
standpoint using Black feminist epistemology calls into question the content of
what currently passes as truth and simultaneously challenges the process of arriving
at that truth.
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