no worries

leonineantiheroine:

femmenoire:

leonineantiheroine:

liquornspice:

poemsofthedead:

pssincerelyadventure:

See here…..

My mostly white women and gender studies class, after reading the Combahee River Collective, wanted to know if they could be Black Feminists because they cared about all those issues and wanted to end oppression and liberate women etc..

I said no. I stand by no. Mainly because, I believe it was Patricia Hill Collins, had a valid point. Black Feminism is grounded in the experience of being black. It’s why the movement varies from other feminism movements in that black feminists wish to work alongside our black brothers BECAUSE it is all the same fight.

Then people had a problem with the fact that black feminism exists at all because why racialize the movement, it tears people apart…

No, the first couple of waves tore people apart by not addressing our issues as women of color and being so limited in class aspects as well.

Also why I don’t ID as a womanist even though I am very fond of Alice Walker and completely believe in her vision (not that I don’t have other critiques of her also) of what womanism means/is. I just feel like it is something that is specific to Black experience. As much as I agree with it, honor it, love it, I don’t feel comfortable using it to describe my experience as a non-Black but First Nations & Muslim person.

(And before anyone asks, no, I do NOT ID as a feminist either. Ever. For reasons.)

Idk, I feel like, as a box of tools/theories one can use…I don’t see why anyone couldn’t id as Black Feminist? I think you can center Black Feminist analysis without being Black.

I feel a little differently about the term Womanism, but idk why.

I have not at all read enough Black Feminist writings to really say tho. I’m anxious to see what folks who’ve read/studied Black Feminisms think?

Only Black women can ID as Black feminists because Black feminism was created by and for Black women as a necessary movement/action/way of thinking because feminism often shit on Black women; same with womanism.  

Identification is different from supporting or utilising the tools built by Black feminists or by anyone who is oppressed within a social movement. And to utilise the tools, one who doesn’t belong to that group—has to be careful that one isn’t using those tools for one’s own purposes which may further marginalise the oppressed group.

The ID is different from quoting or centering Black women when it comes to gender/race issues. Identification is overrated shit a lot of time. 

This is actually historically dependent. 

In the U.S. Black feminist actually just meant “non white” throughout the 1970s. It’s not until the 1980s when those early woc start articulating their definitions of feminism (as positioned next to White women) that became more specific to their races. 

Also, in England in the 1970s-1980s Black feminism meant West Indian, African and Asian women.

So, I actually could understand or relate to non-Black women of color identifying as Black feminists. 

But there was a push from some Asian folks in the UK for example to stop identifying as Black from the ’90s. I think you’re right as in early woc whatever, but I don’t really follow feminist history in that way. Like what about Sojourner Truth? I mean I know engagement with Truth for example is retroactively defined. I just think there is a theory and practice of oh non-Black WOC have defined themselves as Black, but that anti-Blackness is really intense from everyone who is non-Black so like I get my hackles up when non-Black people want to define themselves as Black even in relation to feminism.  

First off, I think Sojourner Truth is a conundrum and I’m not going to even pretend like I could give an intelligent answer to the presumably simple “what about Sojourner?” Your guess is as good as mine. 

I don’t think we should generalize as to the Asian feminists in the UK? The Southall Black Sisters is a feminst org that began in the 70s, continues today, and have always been a majority Asian organization. Black British Feminism: A Reader was published in 1997. And Pratibha Parmar is a prominent Asian feminist filmmaker who identifies (or at least she did last I checked) as a Black feminist. That doesn’t mean that Black, as a interracial political notifier, didn’t fall out of popular use in activist circles but there are some people for whom it’s still important. 

It’s possibly because I’m a historian that interracial feminist coalitions among women of color makes sense to me, but I do wonder a lot what we’ve lost without those coalitions. Not that everyone needs to be a Black feminist, but I’m of the mind that there’s much that we can learn from one another as woc, similarities and differences. And I don’t see that happening, thus the appeal of the theorizing and work from the 1970s/1980s.