Essay #3: Separatism
During the 1970’s and 1980’s, black female scholars addressed the limitations of “separatism” as a way to study social and political mobilization. Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, and Fannie Lou Hamer rejected “separatism” and created new theories for understanding black women’s social and political mobilization…We are dispossessed psychologically and on every other level, and yet we feel the necessity to struggle to change our condition and the condition of all black women1 Political Activist, Angela Davis, involved herself in local and global struggles for progressive social change2… Davis spoke on many different social issues such as racism, economic justice, poverty, prison reform, women’s liberation, welfare reform, reproductive freedom, sexual violence, health child care, public education, apartheid, peace, and disarmament.
Davis’ essay, Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves, was an example of black feminist oration. Ms. Davis, goes on to argue that negro women were no less punished than the negro man…On occasion, when men were hanged, the women were burned alive3…these acts thrown upon slave women were signs to the other black women to not be like their “sisters”. Many slave women threw acts of rebellion, with one being sexual abuse. Black females were forced to submit to their slave masters …to become his unwilling concubine4…
The Essay on Moral, Social and Political Philosophy
Moral, social and political philosophies are fields that share similarities with one another. The most basic and common characteristic found in all three fields is the role and significance of these fields in the manner by which human beings conduct intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships, with one’s self, with one another and with the community. Social, moral and political ...
1 The Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement”, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: New York Press, 1995), 236. 2 Angela Davis, “Reflection on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves”, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: New York Press, 1995), 211. 3 ibid., 212.
4 ibid., 215.
which goes back to McDougald’s claim of the other race stereotyping black women of having low sex standards and being immoral. Another issue Davis argues was how the black woman struggled to be in existence to others …she was compelled to work for wages…the black woman has always remained harnessed to the chores of the household…Yet, she could never be exhaustively defined by her uniquely “female responsibilities1… As an ending result, black women struggled continuously against racism and the exploitation of an unorganized society.
Audre Lorde, a writer of the modern era, was an influential black feminist lesbian. Lorde, voiced out to confront issues of racism in feminist thought. Miss Lorde’s writings are based on the “theory of difference.” One publication Lorde wrote better known as, Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference, discusses the idea of binary opposition between men and women. As Lorde acknowledged issues none other between women, majority of Lorde’s work were concerned mainly with-race and sexuality. With the conflict of being a black lesbian, Lorde battled the stereotype of not being normal, and not keeping with the true heart of the feminist movement…As a forty-nine-year-old black lesbian feminist socialist…I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong2…which leads to the main argument Lorde discusses…
1 Angela Davis, “Reflection on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves”, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: New York Press, 1995), 215. 2 Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: New York Press, 1995), 284. 3 ibid., 284.
The Essay on Black Women
The act of resistance and defiance is one of the most used human reactions that we as Americans often use this to express ourselves in society today. These reactions are also used when some one fee3ls that they are being treated unfairly or in an unjust manner. America is supposed to be a land of equal value and opportunity when it comes to being human. Obviously this is not the way that things ...
4 ibid., 284.
Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them3…In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes…4
Patricia Hill Collins, professor of Afro-American studies and sociology, has helped change the feminist theory with her monograph, Black Feminist Thought (1990).
Collins constructed the standpoint theory, which discussed the oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation which all intersect; and because of that black woman have created world views out of a need for self-definition and work on behalf of social justice…Black women’s everyday acts of resistance challenge two prevailing approaches to studying the consciousness of oppressed groups1…One approach claims that subordinate groups identify with the powerful and have no valid independent interpretation of their own oppresion2…The second approach assumes that the oppressed are less human than their rulers and, therefore, are less capable of articulating their own standpoint3…Collins, later goes on to talk about how African American women have been neither passive victims of nor willing accomplices to their own domination, and as a result…emerging work in black women’s studies contends that black women have a self-defined standpoint on their own oppression.4 1 Patricia Hill Collins, “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought”, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: New York Press, 1995), 338. 2 ibid., 338.
3 ibid., 339.
4 ibid., 339.
Fannie Lou Hamer was an American voting rights activist, and civil rights leader. In the summer of 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, was organized with the purpose of challenging Mississippi’s all-white and anti-civil rights delegation to the Democratic National Convention…Early in the movement, she embraced a spiritually based political perspective that might be described as “moral pragmatism”1 Hamer, was persistent in organizing the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC).
The Essay on Eleanor Roosevelt Blacks And Women
Eleanor Roosevelt, The Social Worker As the wife of a popular United States president, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City, October 11, 1884, and died November 7, 1962. She was an active worker for social causes. She was the niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, and was raised by her maternal grandmother after the premature death of her parents. In 1905 she married her cousin ...
Mrs. Hamer fought for equality all throughout Mississippi believing that no one was free until everyone was free…We followed all the laws that the white people themselves made…But we learned the hard way that even though we had all the law and all the righteousness on our side—that white man is not going to give up his power to us…We have to take for ourselves2. Hamer dedicated her life to the fight for civil rights, and all throughout her political activism, she continued to help the poor families and families in need in her Mississippi community. Fannie Lou Hamer, left behind a historical legacy…More than anything, Hamer taught others how to coexist with pain and challenge. In this regard, the abstract meaning of her story is not necessarily found in a story of triumph or defeat. It is simply a story of how best to live our lives with whatever we have been given, forever priming ourselves to push for a bit more
