Black Women : Feminism - What Have I (A Black Woman) To Do With It?

[cherryblossom]

The white feminist movement discredits the voices of Black women on two grounds.

1. They bond on a basis of common victimhood and see our supposed strength as disqualifying us from being victims.

2. They claim that most of us are too poor to afford the advanced college education that we need to articulate our ideas on the level of theory development. Thus they dismiss our voices as being on the level of mere description.
(Vicki Ruiz - Unequal Sisters)

Even if they welcomed us with open arms we don't share in their history so why should we share in their struggles? Their struggle is to compete with men. Historically the early founders of the feminists movement sought suffrage for white women by promising the white man that they would help him crush the Black man's fight for our rights (Ann Douglas - Terrble Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s ). Our struggle as Black women is not to compete with our men nor to gain power by any means necessary as if we as a people do not rise and fall together.

IMHO feminism is just that--an ism. Just like racism, sexB]ism[/B], ageism or any other kind of ism.As Black women we need an agenda for our struggle that is informed by our history and experience in this country and the world. As it is said freedom is given to those who don't understand it. It's about what we want not what they want for us.

Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves
Bedford Publishers
4198 Carson, Troy, MI 48098
248-641-5063
248-641-5388 (fax)

Clenora Hudson-Weems, Ph.D., in her definitive, pioneering book, Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves, explicates a paradigm for all women of African descent in terms of the relativity of her rich legacy of African womanhood and Black women activism. A family centered construct, rather than the common female centeredness associated with women movements in general, Hudson-Weems in this work articulates the true role of the Africana woman within the constructs of the modern feminist movement. In reclaiming, renaming and redefining Black women and their movement, the author, according to C. Eric Lincoln (Duke U. Professor Emeritus), has established herself "as a careful, independent thinker, unafraid to unsettle settled opinion."

Hudson-Weems has stood firm on her ground that most Black women by their historical and cultural realities are not feminists. She insists that dealing with gender issues does not automatically make one a feminist, thus the feminist has no exclusive on gender issues.....

http://web.missouri.edu/~hudsonweemsc/

 

[Angela22]

Can't stand "feminism"; and when caucasian women try to convince black women they should be on board because we're so "oppressed" by our men, I feel so insulted.

This western society couldn't be more in favor of female dominance, honestly, and particularly that of caucasian females, but they'd have us believing otherwise, just to act like men.

No thanks.