Harris - Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump

Duchess Harris

Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump

Duchess Harris

ISBN 978-3-319-95455-4 e-ISBN 978-3-319-95456-1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95456-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948202

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

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Foreword

In 1851, the Womens Rights Convention was held in Akron, Ohio, and Sojourner Truth addressed the audience. She emphasized the important difference between white women and Black women in terms of their relationships to white men in her legendary Aint I a Woman speech. Part of her speech specifically addresses the differences in how white women and treated relative to Black women

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And aint I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And aint I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And aint I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mothers grief, none but Jesus heard me! And aint I a woman?

In 1989, 138 years after Truths speech, Kimberl Crenshaw, a Law Professor at Columbia University Law School, put a name to the complexity of Black womens lives that Sojourner Truth identified in the nineteenth century. She coined the term intersectionality in a paper, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, published in the University of Chicago Legal Forum (Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8) as a way to help explain the oppression of African-American women.

Professor Harris reminds us that the ideas articulated by Truth were an early form of Black Feminism, and that the issues she identified in the lives of Black women still need to be addressed. Just as white Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott did not understand or care about the plight of Black women, Harris identifies that white feminist for the most part still do not recognize or, in some instances, care about the issues of importance to Black women or how the lives of white women and Black women diverge in experiences. For those not familiar with many of the Black feminist writers, Harris introduces readers to the work of Michelle Wallace, whose book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman , that I enjoyed reading in 1979 when it was published; the poet Ntozake Shange, whose play When Colored Girls Consider Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf , which was turned into a Broadway play; Alice Walker author of The Color Purple , also made into a movie and a Broadway play; Anita Hills accusations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas that pushed the issue into the public debate; the Combahee River Collective; and, among many others, the women who founded the Black Lives Matters Movement. She situates these writers within the US presidents that were in office at the time and discusses the political environment in which these women wrote and were politically active.

Harris historical and current view of the power of Black women and the distinctiveness of Black Feminism demonstrates that contrary to popular myth, Black women to not shy from feminism, but they embrace their own particular form of feminismBlack Feminism. This is a significant update on a very important book, one that has stood the test of time.