Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment

Part 3 of Black Feminist Thought addresses the interrelated issues of Black diasporic feminism, Black feminist epistemology, and the politics of empowerment. As in previous sections, Collins draws on diverse sources to support her arguments. In Chapter 10, for example, she situates Black US feminism within a transnational context with a discussion of film. Femmes Aux Yeux Ouverts (Women with Open Eyes), a documentary made in Togo in 1994, is central to this discussion. The film describes the development of a Black women’s consciousness: “Togolese women speak of how their eyes had formerly been closed but how their political consciousness as women is changing” (237). The women in the film provide sophisticated political analyses and outline the actions they’ve taken to engender change. Their process of political awakening and communal activism mirrors movements for Resistance to Oppression and the Empowerment of Black Women in the US and elsewhere. Similarly, Everyone’s Child, a film made in Zimbabwe in 1996, addresses the impact of AIDS on an African teenager, a topic that resonates with the health concerns Black American mothers have for their children. As Collins notes, film is an ideal medium for conveying information to women of different social classes, including those who cannot read.

Collins draws other parallels between Black women in developing countries and Black women in the US. Key among these is poverty. While not all Black women in the US are poor, Black women collectively face higher rates of poverty than the general population. Collins links Black women’s poverty in the US to the poverty faced by Black women in the developing world, noting that cuts to social welfare make hunger a pressing concern for US Black women: “There is no famine, but as the growing numbers of families who visit soup kitchens suggest, there may be hunger” (238). Black women inside and outside the US are not just linked by their experience of poverty, but also by outsiders’ perceptions of their poverty. Black women around the world are blamed for their poverty and presented as unworthy of help. Collins addressed this issue in an American context with her discussion of the welfare mother in Chapter 4. In Chapter 10, she broadens her perspective on Controlling Images and the Intersectional Oppression of Black Women by quoting the work of Ama Ada Aidoo, who describes how Western media has created a new controlling image of African womanhood:

The image of the African woman in the mind of the world has been set: she is breeding too many children she cannot take care of, and for whom she should not expect other people to pick up the tab. She is hungry, and so are her children. In fact, it has become a cliché of Western photojournalism that the African woman is old beyond her years; she is half-naked, her drooped and withered breasts are well exposed; there are flies buzzing around the faces of her children; and she has a permanent begging bowl in her hand (241).

Collins supports the development of a transnational Black feminist agenda to address the common concerns of the Black diaspora. In addition to pervasive poverty and hunger, transnational Black feminism must address the abuses of rulers. For Africans, this pertains to colonialism and its legacy: “The African woman today is concerned […] with overcoming the problems of foreign domination/rule […]” (237). For Americans, the problem of bad rulers relates to the police: “U.S. Black women are also engaged in overcoming problems of foreign rule and war, but the ‘foreigners’ in the U.S. context are the police. This issue of misuse of police authority against African-Americans, especially against Black men, reemerges as an important concern of U.S. Black women” (238). Collins references the work of Leith Mullings, a Black women anthropologist, to support this claim.: “The women interviewed by Leith Mullings (1997) who feared for their children’s lives in Harlem certainly feel as though they live in a war zone” (238).

Collins draws on diverse sources and examples to explain Black feminist epistemology, a theory of knowledge that prioritizes the lived experiences of Black women. White, heterosexual, affluent men typically suppress or ignore the knowledge claims of oppressed groups. The competing narratives about Thomas Jefferson and the enslaved Sally Hemmings, exemplify this tendency. Several of Hemmings’s descendants claimed that Jefferson fathered her children, in contrast to Jefferson’s white descendants, who contested this claim until DNA testing proved them wrong (252). As Collins notes, however, alternate knowledge rarely threatens conventional knowledge because it is generally ignored. By contrast, alternative epistemologies challenge the basic processes dominant groups use to validate knowledge claims: “If the epistemology used to validate knowledge comes into question, then all prior knowledge claims validated under the dominant model become suspect” (271). The power of Black feminist epistemology, then lies not in the alternative knowledge claims it engenders, but in its challenge to certified knowledge. To quote Collins, Black feminist epistemology “opens up the question of whether what has been taken to be true can stand the test of alternative ways of validating truth. The existence of a self-defined Black woman’s standpoint […] calls into question the content of what currently passes as truth and simultaneously challenges the process of arriving at that truth” (271).

Collins finds parallels between Black feminist epistemology and African practices, validating her transnational approach to Black feminism. Black feminist epistemology centers the lived experiences of Black women and validates knowledge claims via dialogue. According to Collins, the importance of connectedness and dialogue in assessing knowledge claims has African roots. Traditional African societies valued harmony and gained power primarily through family and community. Dialogue allowed this to happen. The centrality of dialogue to Black American women recalls African-based oral traditions, when enslaved Black people validated knowledge orally. Collins quotes Ruth Shays’s description of this oral validation process: “The foreparents found the truth because they listened and they made people tell their part many times. Most often you can hear a lie” (261). The ethic of caring also connects Black feminist epistemology is to African traditions. This ethic emphasizes not just emotions and empathy in knowledge validation, but also individual uniqueness. African humanism also stresses individual uniqueness: “Each individual is thought to be a unique expression of a common spirit, power, or energy inherent in all life” (263).

Collins draws on her personal experiences throughout her book. These anecdotes not only draw readers in, but also demonstrate a central feature of Black feminist epistemology, namely, the importance of personal experience in creating and validating knowledge claims. In Chapter 12, Collins argues that changes in ideas and actions can change the shape of power. She supports this argument with an anecdote about her education:

When my mother taught me to read, took me to the public library when I was five, and told me that if I learned to read, I could experience a form of freedom, neither she nor I saw the magnitude of that one action of my life and the lives that my work has subsequently touched (275).

Collins draws on lived experiences later in the chapter, in her discussion of the disciplinary domain of power and bureaucratic control. Resisting this type of control requires capitalizing on small opportunities, a process Collins explains with an anecdote:

An African-American colleague of mine once referred to this process as one of viewing her university as an egg and her job as one of ‘working the cracks’. From a distance, each egg appears to be smooth and seamless, but, upon closer inspection, each egg’s distinctive patterns of almost invisible cracks become visible. Her insider administrative position granted her a view of higher education not as a well-oiled bureaucracy that was impervious to change, but as a series of cracks and fissures that represented organizational weakness. As she described it, she was committed to ‘working the cracks’ and changing her workplace by persistent use of her insider knowledge concerning its pressure points (282).

Collins returns to her personal experiences at the end of Chapter 12, the last of her book. She describes being concerned after her five-year-old daughter received a playdate invitation from a white classmate: “I wondered what type of reception our daughter would receive in his home” (288). Collins’s anxieties faded when the boy brought a bald, Black Cabbage Patch doll to school: “With this one, small act, this mother took a stand against racism, sexism, and heterosexism in a way that took courage for this region of the United States” (288). Collins shares this anecdote to show that Resistance to Oppression and the Empowerment of Black Women can come in many forms, “illustrat[ing] one of many unobtrusive yet creative ways that all sorts of ordinary people work to change the world around them” (288).