Acknowleding Women's Lived Experiences and Embracing Our Different Identities as Marginalized People

The two readings for this week were wonderful, in my personal opinion. Both writings captured the essence of the black feminist struggle and were able to articulate it with clarity. In addition, I was able to comprehend them without difficulty, as opposed to other readings. In fact I actually read the entire book from which the excerpt by Patricia Hill Collins was taken, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. The article itself simply examines the significance of the black female experience in regard to feminist theory. The focus of her book and the main idea of the excerpt was the development of a more humanistic epistemological standpoint from which black feminist theory contribute and build upon. One page 504, Collins states, “One distinguishing feature of Black feminist thought is its insistence that both the changed consciousness of individuals and the social transformation of political and economic institutions constitute essential ingredients for social change.” An important point in the article was the grounding of feminist theory in the actual lived experience of black women. This is especially important because for many years black women have been silenced. They were voiceless and practically invisible. Using black women as the foundation for black feminist thought provides them with a voice. It is also important to note that in the actual book Collins incorporates the voice of many women, not just scholars, but everyday women. The women were domestic workers, teachers, housewives, etc. She strategically placed them in her novel to show that the only ones with meaningful knowledge to contribute are not the academia and researched scholars. Their lived experiences are in fact vital to the research and to black feminist thought. In Collins’s book she dedicates a section to the examination of the interlocking system of oppressions but her excerpt in the book did not cover this to a large extent, however the Black Feminist Statement by the Combahee River Collective does.

In the opening paragraph of the Black Feminist Statement the main goal of the collective is stated: “The most general statement of our politics at this present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based up on the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking” (Combahee River Collective 232). The statement did a good job of illustrating the importance of a black feminist movement in light of the other major movements, especially in the United States of America. Too often women are forced to decide between what is of greater importance to them: their gender or their race. These think about the upcoming presidential campaign this year. In just the primaries black women were faced with the question of whether they would vote for Hilary Clinton because she was a woman or for Barack Obama because he was a black man. The question itself is absurd. I’m sure any reasonable woman would vote for the person with their best interest in mind. The same thing goes for black feminist theory and epistemology. Black women have been involved in a variety of movements, the suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, the second wave of feminism movement, etc. Eventually black women who were feminist realized that none of these movements represented them and their interests and as a result organizations like the National Black Feminist Organization, the National Council of Negro Women, and the Combahee River Collective were created by and for women to promote their own issues. It is not an issue of ranking the importance of race, gender, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation. All of these categories are equally important and it is important to acknowledge this and find a movement that embraces people who embrace all aspects of their identity. This is what the Combahee River Collective sought to achieve in its Black Feminist Statement.