Feminism and the subtext of Whiteness: Black women's experiences as a Site of Identity
Formation and Contestation of Whiteness
Yancy, George
Western Journal of Black Studies; Fall 2000; 24, 3; Ethnic NewsWatch Pg. 156-166
George Yancy received his B.A. (cum laude) in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh and his M.A. in philosophy
from Yale University. Yancy is editor of African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversations (Routledge, 1998), which won
the Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award for 1999. He is also editor of Cornel West: A Critical Reader (Blackwell
Publishers, 2001). His published articles and reviews have appeared in the Western Journal of Black Studies, the CLA
Journal, The Journal of Social Philosophy, Radical Philosophy Review, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, the
Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories, Social Science Quarterly, and Popular Music and Society. Currently, Yancy is
McAnulty Fellow in the Philosophy Department at Duquesne University.
Abstract
This essay analyzes the structure of whiteness and how it has shaped the feminist movement, thus
marginalizing the voices and political concerns of Black women. Whiteness (racism) is shown to form the
very core ideology and formation of the feminist movement. ft is shown that feminism is limited in
terms of its hegemonic racial epistemological standpoint vis-a-vis Black women's issues concerning pain,
suffering, and self-identity. Consequently, Black women's standpoint must be understood within the
framework of their own unique oppressive existential experiences and how they have created unique
and positive ways of effectively combating oppression. It is shown that Black women have been able to
fashion themselves through the process of self-definition and have drawn upon Black traditional sites of
resistance. Womanism is shown to be a viable alternative to the myopic vision of the feminist
movement.
In a racially imperialist nation such as ours, it is the dominant race that resen'es for itself
the luxury of dismissing racial identity while the oppressed race is made daily aware of their
racial identity. It is the dominant race that can make it seem their experience is
representative. - bell hooks
O ye daughters of Africa, Awake, Awake, Arise! No longer sleep nor slumber .... Show forth
to the world that ye are endowed with noble and exalted faculties. - Maria Steward
In the light of the influence of postmodernist and social constructionist thought, it has become
fashion-able to thematize one's location right from the start, to "fess up," as it were. This process of
disclosing one's location is consistent with the logic of "positionality." On this score, stating one's
position functions to sig-nify an awareness that one's theorizations and knowl-edge-claims are mediated
relative to where one stands. We must properly historicize and contextualize our epistemological claims.
This awareness places in criti-cal relief the assumption that thinking takes place sub specie aeternitatis.
As Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg have argued, "Positionality involves the notion that since our
understanding of the world and ourselves is socially constructed, we must devote special attention to
the differing ways individuals from diverse social backgrounds construct knowledge and make meaning"
(Kincheloe, Steinberg, Rodriguez and Chennault, 1998, p.3). Concerning this concept of positionality,
Black feminist Patricia Hill Collins re-lates a story where she asked her students to assess a Black male
scholar's critical analysis of Black femi-nism. She writes that her students requested "data on dimensions
of his personal life routinely excluded in positivist approaches to knowledge validation, they invoked
concrete experience as a criterion of mean-ing" (Collins, 1991, p.218).
Hence, as a raciated Black male, I am interested in how whiteness often goes unmarked, how it
assumes to speak with universal authority and truth. Indeed, I am existentially, racially, and politically
invested in how whiteness functions. Within the context of this paper, therefore, I will briefly explore
the structure of white-ness, showing how this structure has historically func-tioned within the feminist
movement, thus excluding Black women's experiences as valid media through which identity is formed,
and then go on to delineate Black women's experiences as a site of resistance, semiotic reconstruction,
identity formation and trans-formation. I will also say something about what under-writes Black
women's "experiences" so as to avoid the implication that such experiences are free-floating or devoid
of concrete historical context.
The Structure of Whiteness
The recent plethora of work done in the burgeon-ing field of "white studies" has made an
effective con-tribution toward demonstrating how whiteness assumes to think and to speak for the
entire world. Despite postmodernist and deconstructionist emphasis on lo-cating meaning within a
system of differences, white-ness attempts to transcend differences, constituting it-self as the
transcendental signified. In short, whiteness irrupts difference and attempts to fix reference or mean-ing
around its raciated (white) center. Constituting itself as the site of absolute presence, whiteness functions as an epistemological and ontological anchor-age. As such, whiteness assumes the authority to
marginalize other identities, discourses, perspectives, and voices. By constituting itself as center, nonwhite voices are Othered, marginalized and rendered voice-less. Whiteness creates a binary relationship
of self-Other, subject-object, dominator-dominated, center-margin, universal-particular, etc. Whiteness
arranges these binary terms hierarchically, where the former term is normatively superior to the latter.
As the presumed sovereign voice, treating itself as hyper-normative and unmarked, whiteness conceals
its status as raciated, located and positioned. Theorizing about the tripar-tite dimensions of whiteness,
Ruth Frankenberg argues:
First, whiteness is a location of structural advantage, or race privilege. Second, it is a
"standpoint," a place from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at
society. Third, "white-ness" refers to a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed. (Frankenberg, 1993, p.l)
Failing to come to terms with the contingent sta-tus of whiteness, Chris J. Cuomo and Kim Q.
Hall warn:
For whites to fail to consider whiteness as a historical, con-structed, and dynamic
category is to risk treating it as normal (rather than normalizing), uniform (not
immeasurably variable), paradigmatic (instead of fundamental to racism), and given
(rather than dutifully maintained). Scholars such as Ruth Frankenberg, David Roediger,
Noel Ignatiev, and Vron Ware have begun to ask about the history of whiteness, the
systems and practices that maintain it, and how it might be possible to resist racializing
regimes and accompanying privilege: to resist the power of whiteness. (Cuomo and Hall,
1999, p. 3)
Before moving on to the feminist movement proper, the contention that whiteness embodies a
set of practiccs that go unmarked or unnamed might be illus-trated within the context of AngloAmerican and Euro-pean philosophy. Both traditions are constituted in and through discourse governed
by white male institu-tional power. However, this reality goes unmarked. In prominent Western
philosophical texts (for example, Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy, and Will Durant's
The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers), white male philosophers
are depicted as rational agents, ruminat-ing in perfect freedom, and unencumbered by murky
relationships of race, gender, privilege and power. White male philosophers, in other words, construct
themselves as racially unmarked. Their whiteness and maleness become the norm. And it is from this
site of presumed absolute normativity that white male philosophers theorize, as if from an Archi median
point, about the limits of human knowledge, the nature of God, the self, the basic constitution of reality,
the nature of beauty, and so on. Once these theories become institutional-ized and canonized, that is,
cut off, as it were, from their raciated and gendered value-laden foundation, we often assume that they
are beyond critique, deconstruction, and reformulation. Such theories, in the language of social
constructionists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, assume an ontological status through a process of
reification. Whiteness and male-ness are then rendered incognito and silent.
Although Luce Irigaray has done a brilliant job of critiquing the history of Western philosophy as
an ex-pression of an androcentric discursive field, she leaves unproblematized the power of whiteness
and how it has structured the history of Western philosophy. In-deed, in the language of Irigaray, to
what extent do the "discursive utterances" of white male philosophers conceal raciated conditions
under which such utter-ances are produced? Judith Butler, at least based upon my reading of her work,
needs to problematize and interrogate whiteness as much as she has insightfully interrogated the body,
the category of gender, etc. Does Butler also understand whiteness as an activity consti-tuted through
acts of repetition and performance. One wonders whether white performativity is the fulcrum upon
which turns the history of Anglo-American and European philosophy. We must keep in mind that philosophers such as David Hume, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant (to name only a few) deemed themselves superior not simply because of their having been males; rather, their superiority is fundamentally
con-stituted by their whiteness. Hume and Kant are notori-ous for their belief in the "natural inferiority"
of Blacks of African descent. Indeed, within the context of sev-enteenth- and eighteenth-century AngloAmerican and European philosophy, the very idea of a Black phi-losopher would have been deemed a
contradiction in terms. There were no special privileges that came with being a black male vis-a-vis
white males. To be a Black man in white America, for example, was/is a signifier of powerlessness and
invisibility. Nevertheless, in the spirit of Irigaray and Lacan, I would claim that white-ness involves a
reinscription of phallic logic; it is a site of hegemonic power relations. It is within this context that one
wonders to what extent feminist philosophers Simone de Beauvoir, Eileen O'Neill, Shulamith Firestone,
Irigaray and others have failed to self-reflex-ively take into consideration their own whiteness within the
very process of attempting to create radical alterity, different ways of being and knowing.
The tremendous value of "white studies" has been to thematize whiteness, to reveal it as
normatively lo-cated, so as to disclose its historicity. The aim is to reveal the contingent character of
whiteness and dem-onstrate the value-laden nature of its epistemic claims; indeed, to show how such
claims are reflective of a larger racially invested discursive and political para-digm. "Naming
'whiteness,'" as Frankenberg (1997) says, "displaces it from the unmarked, unnamed status that is itself
an effect of its dominance" (p.6). Naming whiteness within the context of the feminist movement is
precisely one of the aims of this paper. The objective is to provide a sense of how whiteness gets
performed within feminist spaces of theory construction. I will demonstrate how white women within
the feminist movement theorize from an unnamed location of white-ness. I will show how they take for
granted that their experiences, shaped by white skin privilege, are appli-cable and generalizable to Black
or other non-white women. By historicizing and contextualizing the nor-mative ideals of white feminists
within a raciated ideo-logical framework, white feminist knowledge-claims are revealed as
epistemologically questionable in terms of their value for generating an agenda contributing toward the
emancipatory praxis of Black women. In-deed, within this context, speaking from the ("norma-tive")
topside of history, a site of whiteness and power, often renders mute those speaking from the ("nonnor-mative") underside of history, a site of non-whiteness and dispossession. Following from this, of
course, is the need to problematize such constructions as "women's struggle," "common oppression,"
"sister-hood," "common victimization," etc. By interrogating whiteness within the feminist movement,
this will have implications for Black women's praxic resistance and self-definition.
A Subtext of Whiteness
Historically, the feminist movement has assumed that "white women's experiences" tell a story
represen-tative of all women. Such experiences are deemed seam-less and beyond particularity of
location. This "trans-contextualized" conception of experience and (raciated) white identity, however, is
philosophically bankrupt and dismissive of the particular experiences, identities and complexities of nonwhite women. White feminists assumed that their experiences constituted the epistemological and
ontological grounds of gynocentric knowledge production; they assumed that they had the sole power
to name reality. In Foucauldian terms, white women were charged with the power to say what is
real/true. This resulted in an unwillingness "to surrender their hegemonic dominance of theory and
praxis" (hooks, 1984, p. 53). Black feminist theo-rist bell hooks (1981), whose work I primarily draw
upon, captures the social core of American racism and its implications for the feminist movement where
she writes:
Throughout American history, the racial imperialism of whites has supported the custom
of scholars using the term " women " even if they are referring solely to the experience of
white women. Yet such a custom, whether practiced consciously or uncon-sciously,
perpetuates racism in that it denies the existence of non-white women and denies their
racial identity. White women liberationists did not challenge this sexist-racist practice;
they continued it. (p. 8)
The point here is that whiteness, within the femi-nist movement, has assumed a position of
absolute authority, speaking from a center which marginalizes non-white voices. Concerning whiteness
as solidarity, hooks (1984) maintains:
Unconsciously, they felt close to one another because they shared racial identity. The
"whiteness" that bonds them together is a racial identity* that is directly related to the
experience of non-white people as "other" and as a "threat." Often when I speak to
white women about racial bonding, they deny that it exists; it is not unlike sexist men
denying their sexism. Until white su-premacy is understood and attacked by white
women there can be no bonding between them and multi-ethnic groups of women, (p.
55)
The reality is that the feminist movement has reinscribed hegemony through the social, cultural
and political category of whiteness. Moreover, what be-comes clear, at least on hooks's reading, is that
the feminist movement was already undergirded by the logic of identity politics (centered around
whiteness) and the exclusivism of racial essentialism. This does not mean that sexism was of no
importance. But as hooks (1981) says, "American society is one in which racial imperialism supersedes
sexual imperialism" (p. 122).
Examining whiteness within the context of the feminist movement, hooks provides us with a
type of "genealogical" investigation. She states:
Every women's movement in America from its earliest origin to the present day has been
built on a racist foundation - a fact which in no way invalidates feminism as a political
ideology. The racial apartheid social structure that characterized 19th and 20th century
American life was mirrored in the women's rights movement. The first white women's
rights advocates were never seeking social equality for all women; they were seeking
social equality for white wome. (hooks, 1981, p.124).
Within this context, despite feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman's vigilant protestation against
what she terms the "sexuo-economic" exploitation of women, their relegation to the private sphere, and
her creative recommendations for women's participation in build-ing "civilization" (a metonymic term
for white male-ness), her views were undergirded by a millennial project to advance whiteness. Implying
that Black men were lazy and needed to be forced to take care of their families, Gilman reasoned that "it
was best for the negro woman to remain at home and for the man to support her for yet awhile"
(Bederman, 1995, p.146). One wonders whether Gilman had Black women in mind when she wrote her
famous political treatise. Women and Economics. Even prior to Gilman's birth, however, hooks identifies
hypocrisy amongst whites within the abolutionist movement. She argues:
When white women reformers in the 1830s chose to work to free the slave, they were
motivated by religious sentiment. They attacked slavery, not racism. The basis of their
attack was moral reform. That they were not demanding social equality for Black people
is an indication that they remained committed to white racist supremacy despite their
anti-slavery work. While they strongly advocated an end to slavery, they never
advocated a change in the racial hierarchy that allowed their caste status to be higher
than thai of black women or men (hooks, 1981, p. 125).
Continuing her insightful historical observations, hooks maintains:
When the women's movement began in the late 60s, it was evi-dent that the white
women who dominated the movement felt it was "their" movement, that is the medium
through which a white woman would voice her grievances to society (hooks, 1981, pp.
136-137).
Hooks goes on to note:
In most of their writing, the white American woman's experience is made synonymous
with the American woman's experience. While it is in no way racist for any author to
write a book exclusively about white women, it is fundamentally racist for books to be
published that focus solely on the American white woman's experience in which that
experience is assumed to be the American woman's experience (hooks, 1981, p.137).
Defining the white woman's experience as the American woman's experience is demonstrated
by way of hooks's critique of feminist Betty Friedan's The Femi-nine Mystique. Hooks maintains that
when Friedan argued that women wanted more than what was pro-vided within the space of
domesticity, she "did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the chil-dren and maintain the
home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal ac-cess with white
men to the professions" (hooks, 1984, p. 1). Theorizing within the ideological regime of whiteness,
Friedan failed to recognize how her own desire for freedom had implications for the perpetua-tion of
Black women's oppression. To be "female" or "woman" was not sufficient to free Black women from the
role of servant, a signifier of both economic and ontological status. Black historian Elsa Barkley Brown's
solution to this racial myopia is that "we need to recognize not only differences but also the relational
nature of those differences" (E. Brown, 1997, p. 275). Elsa Brown (1997) is succinct where she
concludes, "White women and women of color not only live dif-ferent lives but white women live the
lives they do in large part because women of color live the ones they do" (p. 275). Toni Morrison's keen
observation reso-nates with the views of both hooks and E. Brown where she notes:
It is a source of amusement even now to black women to listen to feminist talk of
liberation while somebody's nice black grand-mother shoulders the daily responsibility of
child rearing and floor mopping, and the liberated one comes home to examine the
housekeeping, correct it, and be entertained by the children. If Women s Lib needs those
grandmothers to thrive, it has a serious flaw (hooks, 1984, p.50).
Hooks also finds a certain level of narcissism and insensitivity in Friedan's work. In a chapter
entitled "Progressive Dehumanization," hooks looks suspi-ciously upon Friedan's "comparison between
the psy-chological effects of isolation on white housewives and the impact of confinement on the selfconcept of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps" (hooks, 1984, p.3). I have found this same level of
insensitivity, myo-pia, and apparent lack of appreciation for differential historical contexts of existential
angst in the work of Monique Wittig. Arguing for lesbianism as a viable option for contesting male
dominance, where she also never raises the issue of what it specifically means to be a Black lesbian,
Wittig posits a very insensitive and problematic analogy. She says, "We are escapees from our class in
the same way as the American runaway slaves were when escaping slavery and becoming free" (Wittig,
1997, p. 271). By making such comparisons, whiteness tends to homogenize differential experiences of
pain and suffering. This tends to de-politicize and render benign the gravity of (non-white) unique experiences of oppression.
Given the above, it is clear that the generic use of such concepts as "common oppression,"
"sisterhood," "victimization," etc., must be analytically interrogated. Critiquing Nancy Chodorow's The
Reproduction of Mothering and Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice, Patricia Hill Collins maintains that
both texts work with a generic conception of "woman." Although she acknowledges the contribution
that both Chodorow's work on sex role socialization and Gilligan's work on the moral development of
women have had on build-ing feminist theory, she makes it clear that "they simul-taneously promote
the notion of a generic woman who is white and middle class" (Collins, 1991, p. 8). Con-tinuing with the
generic deployment of the concept of "woman," hooks (1981) draws an insightful distinc-tion:
White feminists did not challenge the racist-sexist tendency to use the word "woman" to
refer solely to white women; they supported it. For them it served two purposes. First, it
allowed them to proclaim white men world oppressors while making it appear
linguistically that no alliance existed between white women and white men based on
shared racial imperialism. Sec-ond, it made it possible for white women to act as if
alliances did exist between themselves and non-white women in our society and by so
doing they could deflect attention away from their classism and racism (p. 140).
Hooks (1981) concludes:
Had feminists chosen to make explicit comparisons between the status of white women
and that of black people, or more specifi-cally the status of black women and white
women, it would have been more than obvious that the two groups do not share an
identical oppression (pp. 140-141).
From the above, it is not unreasonable to say that the feminist movement has functioned as an
institu-tional site of oppression. By adopting a rhetoric of "common oppression," white feminists "could
pay lip-service to the idea of sisterhood and solidarity between women but at the same time dismiss
black women" (hooks, 1981, p. 9). Whiteness as privilege, ipso facto, already renders questionable and
contradicts the con-cept of "sisterhood." As hooks (1981) argues, "It is a contradiction that white
females have structured a women's movement that is racist and excludes many non-white women" (p.
195). The very concept of a "women's movement" that reinscribes the oppression and exclusion of some
women is a farce and is framed by an emancipatory rhetoric that has nominal import only.
The reader should note that I am not rejecting the many significant insights that white feminists
have marshalled in support of "women's" emancipation. Moreover, white feminist theorists such as
Margaret Anderson, Susan Bordo, Elizabeth Spelman, Nancy Frankenberry, and Sandra Harding, have
made signifi-cant use of the reflections of Black women. Moreover, I am aware that during the late
1970s, many "second wave" feminists were aware and responsive to the ex-clusion of Black women.
This does not, however, ne-gate the significant role that an economy of whiteness has played within the
feminist movement. Lastly, I have not specifically addressed how differential class positionality functions
within the lives of white women. I recognize that white women exist within different class locations that
signify asymmetrical power relations and that some white women did not feel included within the
feminist movement because of their class status. However, this does not negate the overriding power of
whiteness. Black sociologist and philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois demonstrated that even in situations where
Blacks and whites shared the same working class status, whites possessed a "public and psychological
wage" (Harris, 1998, p.115). Du Bois elaborates:
They [whites] were given public deference...because they were white. They were admitted freely
with all classes of white people, to public functions, to public parks.... The police were drawn from their
ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with...leniency.... Their vote selected public
officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect on their personal
treat-ment.... White schoolhouses were the best in the com-munity, and conspicuously placed, and they
cost any-where from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools (Harris, 1998, p.116).
Black political activist Fannie Lou Hamer cap-tures the narcissism and psychological power of
white-ness, regardless of class location, where she observes:
In the past, I don't care how poor this white woman was, in the South she still felt like
she was more than us. In the North, I don't care how poor or how rich this white woman
has been, she still felt like she was more than us (Collins, 1991, p. 191).
In short, class status does not fundamentally dis-mantle or displace whiteness. Regardless of class,
whiteness as a power bloc persists.
Sites of Self-Definition and Resistance
Given the above reflections on the structure of whiteness and how it is configured within the
feminist movement, what are Black women to do? The very assumption that white women have the
authority to speak for Black women involves a form of erasure. Black women are denied the status of
being agents of their own lives, namers of their own reality. Their ex-periences are denied any authority.
Through a herme-neutics of suspicion, however, the "whose experience?" question has radical
implications for deconstructing the presumed universality of white women's experi-ences.
Demonstrating a keen awareness of white women's hegemony within the feminist movement, Shiela
Radford-Hill maintains: Black women now realize that part of the problem within the movement was our
insistence that white women do for/with us what we must do for/with ourselves; namely, frame our
own social action around our own agenda for change.... Critical to this discussion is the right to organize
on one's own behalf... Criticism by black feminists must reaffirm this principle (Collins, 1991, p. 34).
The Combahee River Collective's 1977 statement permeates with an awareness of the need for
Black women to confront their peculiar situational plight: The psychological toll of being a black woman
and the difficul-ties this presents in reaching political consciousness and doing political work can never
be underestimated. There is a very low value placed upon black women's psyches in this society, which
is both racist and sexist (The Combahee River Collective, 1997, p. 67).
The Collective is also aware of the multiple range of simultaneous oppressions suffered by Black
women: racial, sexual, and class oppression. As Janette Y. Tay-lor observes: Womanist and Black feminist
theorists explain how women's lives are shaped by relationships of race or ethnicity, class and gender
and provide significant insights into the lives and health of African American women. We must analyze
the experiences of African American women in terms appropriate to their realities and not exclusively
define or compare those experiences through theories that privilege White middle-class women and
men. Analysis often appears different when considering race or ethnicity, class, and gender as significant
influences in women's lives (Taylor, 1998, p. 62).
Black women's experiences contest the assump-tion of "common oppression" by the existence
of "in-terlocking structures of oppression," to use Collins's turn of phrase. This does not negate,
however, the per-vasive and dominant destructive role that whiteness (race) has played, and continues
to play, in the lives of Black women.
But what is it that underwrites Black women's ex-periences? Such experiences, it seems to me,
involve issues of identity formation, context and history. Ex-perience does not consist of a set of discrete
empirical data organized from within the private sphere of an autonomous subjectivity. This would lead,
when car-ried to its logical conclusion, to a solipsistic world-view. It is not possible to talk about "Black
women's experiences" within the framework of that assumption. One must begin, at least minimally,
with a set of intersubjectively shared "self-world" (construed broadly) interactions. In America,
therefore, what is the socio-historical context ("world") within which Black women were thrown
(Geworfenheit)? In exis-tential terms, it is the facticity of American racism (whiteness) that has
fundamentally shaped the experi-ences of Black women. White women's experiences have been
"gestalted" differently because of their white skin privilege. This does not mean that all white women
"experience" the world in exactly the same fashion. It does mean, however, that whiteness, particularly
in America, fundamentally shapes how white women see themselves vis-a-vis non-white women, even if
uncon-sciously.
Black women were introduced to America through the Middle Passage, a voyage of death,
bodily objecti-fication, humiliation, dehumanization, geographical and psychological dislocation, and
tight spatialization. As Olga Idriss Davis observes: The arrival of African American women in the
American canvas of history, space provided a marker, a symbol of limits, a meta-phor for outsider:
spaces define the dialectical nature of white and black. These spaces of beingness and non-beingness,
re-spectively, were translated into acts of degradation and inhu-manity which black women experienced
during the Middle Pas-sage (Davis, 1999, p. 366).
Sold from auction blocks, Black women were commodified, defined and sold as chattel. Within
the context of this economy of Black bodies, "advertise-ments announcing the sale of black female
slaves used the terms 'breeding slaves,' 'child-bearing woman,' 'breeding period,' 'too old to breed,' to
describe indi-vidual women" (hooks, 1981, p. 39-40). Standing na-ked on the auction block, witnessed by
both white men and women, the Black woman became a blood and flesh text upon which whites could
project all of their fears, desires and fantasies. The Black female body became the atavistic trope,
subject to the white gaze. The reader need only think of the sexually preda-tory actions of Dr. Flint as
depicted in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The Black female body was an "open" site
of sexual exploitation. As hooks (1981) notes, "Rape was a common method of torture slavers used to
subdue recalcitrant black women. The threat of rape or other physical brutalization in-spired terror in
the psyches of displaced African fe-males" (p. 18). White women were of very little help in situations
involving the rape of a Black woman. Hooks (1981) observes: Often in desperation, slave women
attempted to enlist the aid of white mistresses, but these attempts usually failed. Some mis-tresses
responded to the distress of female slaves by persecuting and tormenting them. Others encouraged the
use of black women as sex objects because it allowed them respite from unwanted sexual advances, (p.
36)
Hooks (1981) also notes that "in most slaveholding homes, white women played as active a role
in physi-cal assaults of black women as did white men. While white women rarely physically assaulted
black male slaves, they tortured and persecuted black females" (p. 38). In Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, Douglass tells a vivid story of a young enslaved girl, actually Douglass's wife's cousin,
who had fallen asleep while watching Mrs. Hick's baby. Mrs. Hick was the wife of Mr. Giles Hick, a socalled "white slave master." Finding the young black girl asleep, Mrs. Hick "jumped from her bed, seized
an oak stick of wood by the fire-place, and with it broke the girl's nose and breast bone, and thus ended
her life" (Douglass, 1993, p. 53). Hooks suggests that white men and women formed an alli-ance against
Black women on the grounds of shared racism (whiteness). The rape of Black women, on the above
reading, was not just an act of male domination and violence, but served the institution of whiteness by
extinguishing, as Angela Davis has intimated, the will of Black women to flee conditions of slavery and by
specifically demoralizing Black men. All acts of rape violate a woman's spiritual and bodily integrity, but
when mediated by whiteness, under the institution of American racism, the rape of a Black woman by a
white man is structured by more complex psycho-sexual, racial dimensions.
Black women's experiences were not only shaped by shared physical threats of rape and death,
but they were also shaped by a semiotic field of whiteness that led to a form of "epistemic violence," to
use Ruth Frankenberg's turn of phrase. In other words, Black women came to know themselves in terms
of the de-structive images created from within white imagina-tive spaces. Morrison's fictional character
Pecola Breedlove, who self-destructively internalized the aes-thetic ideals of whiteness, is an
unforgettable tragic figure in the history of American literature. Barbara Andolsen has argued that "the
differential impact of white beauty standards serves to maintain divisions among women, even Black
and white women who are both feminists" (Townes, 1997, p. 243). In other words, when white feminists
fail to call into question aesthetic stratification along racial lines, where whiteness is ideal, this blocks
potential alliances. Continuing with this theme of epistemic violence, Alice Walker (1983) writes: Black
women are called, in the [racist] folklore that so aptly identifies one's status in society, "the mule of the
world," be-cause we have been handed the burdens that everyone else -everyone else - refused to
carry. We have also been called "Matriarchs, " "Superwomen," and "Mean and Evil Bitches. " Not to
mention "Castrators" and "Sapphire's Mama", (p. 32)
Even as Black women came to acquire more "re-spectable" jobs as domestic workers, they were
con-stantly in fear of being raped, sexually harassed, and treated as inferiors. Collins (1991) notes: The
treatment afforded Black women domestic workers exempli-fies the many forms that objectification can
take. Making Black women work as if they were animals or "mules uh de world" represents one form of
objectification. Deference rituals such as calling Black domestic workers "girls" and by first names enables employers to treat their employees like children, as less capable human beings, (p. 69)
Marcia Y. Riggs has argued that Black women (poor, working class, and professional) did not
manage to escape white projected sexual myths. She concludes: Thus, while it is true that Black women
and men experienced a common oppression deriving from life in a racist society, Black women
experienced racism in a qualitatively different manner because of the additional constraints of gender
oppression upon their lives. (Riggs, 1997, p. 68)
Within such a socio-historical context, it is no wonder that many Black women came to see their
homes not as sites of oppression, but as spaces of safety away from the racist outside world, an outside
racist world that constructed them as Jezebels. In other cases, Black women not only had to fight against
misogynist Black boyfriends and husbands, endure microsocial acts of racism on a daily basis within the
larger social sphere, but also work for wages that barely allowed for their survival.
Within our contemporary context, Black women are represented as "welfare queens." This is
simply another way of controlling the semiotic medium in terms of which Black women are constructed.
"She is portrayed," according to Collins, "as being content to sit around and collect welfare, shunning
work and pass-ing on her bad values to her offspring" (Collins, 1991, p. 77). This is the image, held stable
by the white gaze, of the lazy, shuffling, and uneducated "Negress."
Although Black women's experiences are varied, it is my contention that they have all suffered
the slings and arrows of outrageous whiteness along a continuum of exposure. The point here is that
Black women's socio-historical, and existential trajectory differs from white women's experiences. This
does not mean that Black and white women, within the complex grid of oppressive structures, may not
"share" some experi-ences on the basis of which they might develop soli-darity. Nevertheless, we must
not forget the interlock-ing systems of oppression that have impacted Black women. This is not to say
that Black women's experi-ences constitute the most historically important stand-point. Moreover, what
binds Black women's experi-ences has nothing to do with the existence of a "Black essence." Critiquing
essentialism, hooks (1995) ar-gues that "there is a radical difference between a repu-diation of the idea
that there is a black "essence" and the recognition of the way black identity has been spe-cifically
constituted in the experience of exile and struggle" (p. 122). I agree with hooks that Black women speak
with an "authority of experience" constituted and shaped by a history which has profound somatic and
psychological implications for the "lived body" of Black women. "Experience," on this score, is not to be
reduced to a system of discursive practices accord-ing to which experience is rendered secondary to the
primacy of language. Clenora Hudson-Weems's re-search warns of the uncritical acceptance of
dominant cultural theorizations. She argues: ...we take the Procrustean approach, via superimposing
alien or outside theories and methodologies as a primary means of analyzing and interpreting our texts
from a so-called legitimate, universally theoretical perspective. Be it known that this ruling perspective
in reality is none other than just another perspective (Hudson-Weems, 1997, p. 79).
In short, Hudson-Weems warns of the conse-quences of Africana Womanism erasure within a
theo-retical system deployed by white theorists. Given the powerful heteronomous forms of racist
structures con-tributing toward the erasure and oppression of Black people, I'm not sure that Black
women can politically or existentially afford to relinquish a viably embodied conceptualization of
"identity," "self," and the "au-thority of experience." Given the sovereign voice of whiteness operative in
the feminist movement, and within American culture more generally, it is incum-bent upon Black
women (and other non-white women) to conceptualize the self as a subject of agency and selfnarrativity. This does not mean, of course, accept-ing the construction of the self as transcendental, as
the locus of intelligibility and meaning.
Deconstructing the notion that Black women con-stitute an essential category does not
eliminate the facticity and historicity of their oppression within the framework of white hegemonic
power. Concerning the notion of self-recovery hooks reasons: Social construction of the self in relation
would mean...that we would know the voices that speak in and to us from the past.... Yet, it is precisely
these voices that are silenced, suppressed, when we are dominated.... Domination and colonization attempt to destroy our capacity to know the self to know who we are. We oppose this violation, this
dehumanization, when we seek self-recovery, when we work to unite fragments of being, to recover our
history (Bat-Ami Bar On, 1993, p. 88).
Hooks' point is that there is no "ontological es-sentialist self' which exists beneath the top layer,
as it were, of social reality. Her point is that Black women, for example, are not completely shaped by
racist dis-cursive regimes of meaning. Hooks appears to move between a poststructuralism and
humanism. The Black "subject" is subjected to regimes of meaning and yet she is capable of acts of
historical self-reconstruction. The Black woman "is both self-namer and self-definer" (Hudson-Weems,
1997, p. 83). The self, on this read-ing, has a relatively open texture; it is capable of weav-ing received
narratives (oppressive or not) with new ennobling narratives of identity formation. One might say that
Black women are capable of different discur-sive performances (or emplotments) that contest
mythopoetic narrative constructions created within a white racist historical context. In this way, Black
women are not just marked by discursivity, but are ca-pable of creating discursive streams that are selfem-powering. As philosopher Calvin O. Schrag has ar-gued: The human self called into being as a
coupling of discourse and action is neither a sovereign and autonomous self whose self-constitution
remains impervious to any and all forces of alterity, nor a self caught within the constraints of
heteronom\\ deter-mined by forces acting upon it. The self as the who of action lives between
autonomy and heteronomy (Schrag, 1997, p. 59).
And the reader should keep in mind that it was through self-narrativity and resistance that
Black women (and Black men) shaped the very contours of the mean-ing of American democracy. As
Nah Dove notes: Thus, the struggle for survival - the resistance of African people to inhumanity involved
in the capturing, enslavement, and colo-nization process - has not only facilitated the humanization and
democratization of Western society but has provided the back-bone of social change (Nah Dove, 1998,
p. 532).
Contemporary Black womanist self-determination, however, was made possible by those who
engaged in passed acts of disruptive, counter-hegemonic con-sciousness raising. They cleared a
politically performative space within which contemporary womanists are able to participate. Dove
reminds us that: Although it is important to define the oppressions that effect the lives of African
women, men and children, for the purpose of developing liberationist theories and strategies, it is also
neces-sary to understand that African people have a history/herstory rich in resistance to European
forms of oppression. Acts of resistance must he placed within liberationist theory because they have laid
the foundation for future strategies concerning the institutional development for self-determination
(Dove, 1998, p. 532).
In 1852, at the Second National Women's Suffrage Convention in Akron, Ohio, with white
women scream-ing "Don't let her speak!", Sojourner Truth contested an imposed regime of meaning
when she bellowed "Ain't I a Woman?" Through the power of naming, she changed her slave name from
Isabella Baumfree to So-journer Truth, a name indicative of her existential mis-sion and self-conceptual
reorientation. Truth enacted the dialectical relationship between thought and ac-tion which "suggests
that changes in thinking may be accompanied by changed actions and that altered ex-periences may in
turn stimulate a changed conscious-ness" (Collins, 1991, p. 28). Truth's question raises the dialectics of
recognition. Her question critiques the white ideological framework that would deny her "true"
womanhood because of her Blackness. Her question-ing, in short, is not one of self-doubt, but functions
as a demand placed upon white women to critique their own standpoint.
As a site of self-definition and consciousness trans-formation, Collins draws from the blues
tradition as a site of resistance, self-definition, existential consola-tion, and intersubjective confirmation.
Drawing upon the work of Michele Russell, Collins maintains that the works of Bessie Smith, Bessie
Jackson, Billie Holi-day, and Nina Simone encourage Black women to take charge of their past, present
and future. According to Collins (1991): The songs themselves were originally sung in small communities,
where boundaries distinguishing singer from audience, call from response, and thought from action
were fluid and permeable. These records were made exclusively for the "race market" of AfricanAmericans. Because literacy was not possible for large numbers of Black women, these recordings
represented the first permanent documents expressing a Black woman's standpoint accessible to Black
women in diverse communities (p. 100).
Speaking within the tragic context of our mothers' lost gardens, Alice Walker (1984) writes:
Listen to the voices of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, and Aretha Franklin,
among others, and imag-ine those voices muzzled for life. Then you may begin to compre-hend the lives
of our "crazy,' "Sainted" mothers and grand-mothers. The agony of the lives of women who might have
been Poets, Novelists, Essayists, and Short-Story Writers (over a pe-riod of centuries), who died with
their real gifts stifled within them (p. 234).
The oral tradition in African and African-Ameri-can culture has served Blacks as a site of
linguistic codification used to conceal messages from white slave masters. One need only think about
the Black spiritual tradition and how those songs possessed an illocutionary function to signal an escape
from op-pressive plantations. As womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland writes: The spirituals served
as coded messages, signalling the arrival of Moses in the person of Harriet Tubman or other ex-slaves
who went back to Egypt to "tell ole Pharaoh, Let My People Go." "Steal away, " sang the maker of the
spiritual, "the chariot is comin(Copeland, 1997, p. 120).
Within the context of the bluesified oral tradition, however, resistance is often very direct. Billie
Holiday's "Strange fruit" (recorded during a period of increased lynching of Black bodies),
"demonstrated a direct con-nection to the antilynching political activism of Ida B. Wells and other
better-known Black feminists" (Collins, 1991, p. 101). It is important to note that these songs reached
countless numbers of Black women, encouraging them to reflect and theorize within the very midst of
quotidian life. As such, their songs challenged traditional sites of knowledge production and sociopolitical cognition.
To hear a Black woman requires the ability to lis-ten and to take her critical subjectivity
seriously. The call-and-response discursive dynamic within African-American culture is indicative of a
hermeneutics of listening that provides intersubjective validation and the development of communal
epistemic criteria (though often unthematized) for knowledge confirma-tion. The idea of genuinely
listening to a Black woman creates a mutual intersubjective space of bearing wit-ness. Taylor (1998) has
done critical methodological research in the area of nursing as practiced through Black women's
experiences. She writes: As a researcher, to bear witness is more than written documenta-tion of the
experiences of others. Bearing witness involves an active engagement of the self in order to create the
space in which to share in the experiences of others. In this mutual space of copresencing, we affirm and
validate the experience as real. As a result, nurse researchers become more connected with them-selves
and each other when bearing witness (p. 59).
The silencing of Black women's voices and the delegitimization of their experiences took place,
as I have argued above, when white feminists assumed their own experiences as norm. Within this
framework, Collins points out the importance of safe spaces within which Black women can speak and
be heard. She writes: While domination may be inevitable as a social fact, it is unlikely to be hegemonic
as an ideology within that social space where Black women speak freely. This realm of relatively safe discourse, however narrow, is a necessary condition for Black women's resistance. Extended families,
churches, and African-American community organizations are important locations where safe discourse
potentiallv can occur (Collins, 1991, p. 95).
In short, there is a need for non-whiticized spaces of Black womanist critical resistance. Davis
(1999) has insightfully researched the kitchen as a site of safety and resistance. She observes: During the
antebellum period, black women invented the cul-tural space of the kitchen to recover their dignity and
the power of tradition. As they emerged from the kitchen of black-domi-nated space into the dining
room of white-dominated space, they brought intellectual notions of collective experience and struggles
with which to give expression to their social, political, and cultural contributions to American history (p.
364).
This safe space, of course, also allows Black women to avoid the white gaze; it allows them a
tem-porary reprieve from the white economy of Othering Black bodies. "In the comfort of daily
conversations," according to Collins (1991), "through serious conver-sation and humor, AfricanAmerican women as sisters and friends affirm one another's humanity, specialness, and right to exist"
(p. 97). In their roles as mothers, daughters, sisters and friends, Black women dissemi-nate knowledge
important to their survival as Black women, creating social, existential, and narrative co-hesive bonding.
Again, Copeland insightfully observes: Black women remember and draw strength in their own anguish
from hearing and imitating the strategies adopted by their moth-ers, grandmothers, greatgrandmothers, great-great-grandmoth-ers to handle their suffering. These stories evoke growth and
change, proper outrage and dissatisfaction, and enlarge Black women's moral horizon and choices
(Copeland, J997, pp. 123-124). And as Davis notes, "the kitchen provided a space in which Black women
passed on survival skills to their daughters and helped them develop ways to confront oppressive
conditions " (Davis, 1999, p. 369).
Collins also locates Black women's literary tradi-tion as a site of resistance, theory construction
and safety. She sees the Black woman's literary tradition as a form of art that is "emancipatory because
it fuses thought, feeling, and action and helps its participants see their world differently and act to
change it" (Collins, 1991, p. 103). She concludes, "In all, the emerging work of this growing community
potentially offers another safe space where Black women can ar-ticulate a self-defined standpoint" (pp.
102-103). And it is Hudson-Weems who clearly warns against the blind appropriation of white-centered
literary traditions. She warns: The problem, however, is that contrary to white or European theorists,
who justifiably approach their literature from the per-spective of the centrality of their culture,
Eurocentrism, most Africana scholars use theories that are alien and have not been passed through our
critical matrix or lens (Hudson-Weems, 1997, p. 79).
The point is that Black women must avoid intel-lectual co-optation through the use of
extraneous (and, indeed, anti-Black) theoretical frameworks. Hence, it is important to transform
traditional spaces in the acad-emy. Again, Davis uses her critical research to bear upon this issue. She
writes: How do African American women intellectuals use their kitchen legacy to negotiate the whitedominated space of the Academy? They redefine their importance in the domain of whiteness, they
trans-form students and faculty alike, and they define and inform experi-ence through provocative
scholarship. Like theirforemothers in plan-tation kitchens, African American women scholars carve out
places in the Academy to nurture and transform work once relegated to "kitchen space " outside
mainstream departments and scholarly pub-lications for presentation at the intellectual "dinner table "
of the Big House. In their scholarship, African American women deconstruct previously held assumptions
about politics and resistance (Davis, 1999, p. 372).
In addition, Teresa Fry Brown cautions Black womanist scholars not to become elitist and fail to
re-member the spaces cleared by the resilient Black bod-ies and resistant and recalcitrant voices of
earlier Black women. Teresa Brown notes: When we see our sisters, we must remember whence we
came. We must remember who broke down the doors that allow us to sit in book-lined offices and
complain about the disparities of the system. We must use the voice we have found to articulate the
needs of our sisters (T. Brown, 1997, p. 72).
Each of the above sites of resistance are also sites of humanization. What is revealed is that
Black women are not devoid of Geist, but engage in spiritual and physical communal praxic forms of
resistance that help to define who they are and what they're capable of becoming. Within such
contexts, knowledge is shaped, disseminated and transformed. It is an epistemology that recognizes the
importance of social location on knowledge production, but attempts to avoid privileg-ing this
knowledge as norm. "No one group," accord-ing to Collins (1991), "possesses the theory or methodology that allows it to discover the absolute "truth" or, worse yet, proclaim its theories and
methodologies as the universal norm evaluating other groups' experi-ences" (pp. 234-235). One
fundamental critical point of my argument in this paper, of course, has been to reveal the structure of
whiteness and how it assumes the role of sovereign voice. Through the process of naming and
contextualizing whiteness, and showing how the feminist movement has been structured by whiteness
as an uninterrogated site of privilege, I have attempted to disrupt its sovereign voice; and, indeed, to
provide a brief sketch of the historical, cultural and existential tonality of Black women's voices. And it is
those voices that are characteristically womanist. To conclude with womanist theologian Jacquelyn
Grant: A womanist is a strong Black woman who has sometimes been mislabeled as a domineering
castrating matriarch. A womanist is one who has developed survival strategies in spite of the oppression
of her race and sex in order to save her family and her people (Grant, 1989, p. 205).
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