The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought
I can tell I got all excited while reading this chapter by Patricia Hill Collins by the number of sticky bookmarks protruding from it - probably one for every time I had a little brain explosion. I love that. Anywho:
"The unpaid and paid work that Black women perform, the types of communities in which they live, and the kinds of relationships they have with others suggests that African American woman, as a group, experience a different world than those who are not black and female ... a subordinate group not only experiences a different reality than a group that rules, but a subordinate group may interpret that reality differently than a dominant group." But lacking access to the media, academia, etc, obviously it's hard to get that perspective heard and accepted.
One example is that a Black woman employed by a White woman will have a whole different set of concerns to her employer. Collins quotes another Black woman: "If you eats these dinners and don't cook 'em, if you wears these clothes and don't buy or iron 'em, then you might start thinking that the good fairy or some spirit did all that... Black folks don't have no time to be thinking like that... But when you don't have anything else to do, you can think like that. It's bad for your mind, though."
There's a great quote from Commander Sisko somewhere in DS9, something like "When you live in heaven you don't think about who takes out the trash" - I must see if I can find it.
(I wonder if there's a parallel here with the way Muslim women are sometimes puzzled by Western feminists' concern with the burqa.)
More in the next posting.
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Collins, Patricia Hill. "The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought". in James, Joy and Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean (eds). The Black Feminist Reader. Blackwell, Oxford, 2000.
"The unpaid and paid work that Black women perform, the types of communities in which they live, and the kinds of relationships they have with others suggests that African American woman, as a group, experience a different world than those who are not black and female ... a subordinate group not only experiences a different reality than a group that rules, but a subordinate group may interpret that reality differently than a dominant group." But lacking access to the media, academia, etc, obviously it's hard to get that perspective heard and accepted.
One example is that a Black woman employed by a White woman will have a whole different set of concerns to her employer. Collins quotes another Black woman: "If you eats these dinners and don't cook 'em, if you wears these clothes and don't buy or iron 'em, then you might start thinking that the good fairy or some spirit did all that... Black folks don't have no time to be thinking like that... But when you don't have anything else to do, you can think like that. It's bad for your mind, though."
There's a great quote from Commander Sisko somewhere in DS9, something like "When you live in heaven you don't think about who takes out the trash" - I must see if I can find it.
(I wonder if there's a parallel here with the way Muslim women are sometimes puzzled by Western feminists' concern with the burqa.)
More in the next posting.
__
Collins, Patricia Hill. "The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought". in James, Joy and Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean (eds). The Black Feminist Reader. Blackwell, Oxford, 2000.