Words of Fire (90 page)

Not all Afrocentric thinkers need be so blatantly antifeminist. Some African American women have attempted to combine nationalism and feminism. As black feminists have sought an independent identity from dominant white, bourgeois feminism, some have explicitly turned to Afrocentric ideology for their understanding of these gender relations. These efforts stressed that African American women grew up in families that had roots in African experiences and, therefore, were fundamentally different from the ones described by white feminists. Such arguments recognized the need to search for solutions to sexism in black families that are based on their own experiences and history.

One of the most successful attempts to rely on Afrocentric thinking comes from a newly evolving school of thought known as African women's diaspora studies. This school of thought is represented best by
Black Woman Cross-Culturally
edited by Filomina Chioma Steady and
Women in Africa and the African Diaspora,
edited by Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Andrea Benton Rushing, and Sharon Harley and tries to reclaim the African past for African American women. These works have significantly raised the level of understanding of the connections among women in Africa and its diaspora. A number of the scholars published in these books have read extensively about black women around the world and have drawn bold comparisons. For them, women from Africa and the African diaspora are united by a history of “economic exploitation and marginalization manifested through slavery and colonization and ... [in the contemporary period]
through neocolonialism in the United States.”
⁴³
Influenced by nationalist impulses, they criticize much of the earlier literature on black women for using a white filter to understand African culture. Further, they persuasively argue that too often black women are presented as one-dimensional victims of patriarchy or racism.
⁴⁴
Instead, these women use African feminist theory as described by Steady to remove this white filter on African American lives and to identify “the cosmology common to traditional African women who lived during the era of the slave trade” and who provided a common cultural source for all black women today.
⁴⁵

Steady is careful to point out that she does not want to romanticize African history as she acknowledges that tensions and conflicts existed in Africa as it did elsewhere. Unfortunately, none of these authors explores any of these tensions and conflicts, and, thus, they present an overwhelmingly harmonious picture. Nor do they clearly articulate the ways that they will unearth the cosmology of Africans living in the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Their footnotes do not reveal any sources on this cosmology that go beyond the problematic anthropological reports that give a malebiased view of the past.

While African women's diaspora studies take us a long way, they reveal some of the same shortcomings I have criticized in the nationalist writings of Asante and Harper-Bolton. These feminists accept the ideology of complementarity as if it signified equal. They rely on a notion of African culture that is based on biased anthropological reports of a static, ahistorical Africa. Finally, they construct a dichotomy between African feminism and Western feminism that depends on the Afrocentric spirituality/materialism dichotomy. Clearly, these women advocate women's equality, but they find it much easier to address racism in the women's movement than sexism in black liberation struggles. In their attempt to combine Afrocentric and feminist insights, they recognize the importance of nationalist discourse for countering the hegemonic ideology that seeks to confine African American lives. But I would go beyond the conservative agenda that nationalists have constructed and, thus, strengthen their advocacy of a feminist discourse.

In the fine special issue of
Signs
on women of color, Patricia Hill Collins has produced one of the most persuasive attempts to combine Afrocentric thought and feminism. In the tradition of Molefi Asante, she recognizes the need to struggle for increased space within the academy for African American scholars. Although she does not say so explicitly, I read her article in the light of the narrow-minded failure of many academic departments to take Afrocentric scholars seriously and to give African Americans tenure. In recognition of the serious work many women's studies programs must do to make their classrooms appeal to more than white middle-class students, she tries to sensitize feminists to the worldview that their black
students may bring with them to classes but that may be at odds with narrow academic training.

She may have gone too far, however, when she tries to identify an essential black women's standpoint. For Collins, the black women's standpoint has evolved from the experiences of enduring and resisting oppression. Black feminist thought is interdependent with this standpoint as it formulates and rearticulates the distinctive, self-defined standpoint of African American women.
⁴⁶
At the same time, black feminist theory intersects with Afrocentric and feminist thought.

For Collins, both Afrocentric and female values emerge out of concrete experience:

Similarly:

Thus, the contours of Afrocentric feminist epistemology include black women's material conditions and a combination of Afrocentric and female values. Collins's Afrocentric feminist values shares much with the essentialist cultural feminism of Carol Gilligan, including the ethic of caring and the ethic of personal accountability.
⁴⁹

Collins builds from the black feminist insight that black women experience oppressions simultaneously. Unfortunately, she remains mired in a false dichotomy that limits the value of this insight. For example, while she recognizes the importance of discussing class, she is unable to keep class as a variable throughout her analysis. At times, she assumes that all white women are middle class and all black women are working class. She sets up working-class black women to comment on the lives of privileged white women:

Missing in such accounts is the position of middle-class black women and working-class white women. In Collins's view, all white women have class privilege, although she does recognize that some black women have obtained middle-class status. She admits that “African American women do not uniformly share an Afrocentric feminist epistemology since social class introduces variations among black women in seeing, valuing, and using Afrocentric feminist perspectives.”
⁵¹
She even acknowledges that black women's experiences do not place them in a better position than anyone else to understand oppression.
⁵²
Yet the quintessential black woman is one who has “experienced the greatest degree of convergence of race, class, and gender oppression....”
⁵³
Collins certainly does not raise the possibility that class differences may create tensions within the black sisterhood that she takes as unproblematic.

Ultimately, she falls prey to the positivist social science that she seeks to critique. She links positivist methodology to a Eurocentric masculinist knowledge-validation process that seeks to objectify and distance itself from the “objects” of study.
⁵⁴
Like Asante, she recognizes many of the shortcomings with mainstream social science research such as the tendency to create false objectivity. Yet also like Asante, she falls into a positivist trap. In her case, she brings her readers back to the possibility of universal truths.

Like most positivists, she never asks, “whose universal truths are these anyway?” Collins's quest for universal truth will be doomed to failure as long as she accepts as unproblematic an Afrocentric sisterhood across class, time, and geography. Her truths depend on an Afrocentric ideology that suppresses differences among African Americans.

Like all oppositional discourses, the Afrocentric feminism of Collins, Steady, and Terhog-Penn have multisided struggles. They compete for ideological space against the dominant discourse on Africa, its diaspora, and within feminist and nationalist movements. The dialectics of discursive struggle links their work to dominant discourse and other competing oppositional voices. Both dominant and counterdiscources occupy contested terrain. Afrocentric feminists may reveal an almost inescapable tendency in
nationalist discourse that ties it to conservative agendas on gender and sexuality. At the same time, they reveal the strengths of nationalist ideology in its counterattack against racism.

1
See Cheryl Clarke, “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community,” in
Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology,
ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983), 197—208; and Audre Lorde,
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
(Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984).

2
They only need point to the racist scientific theories that AIDS began in Central Africa from people who ate [subtext: had sex with] green monkeys to prove this point. Spread by the popular and scientific media, this theory appealed to a white culture that still believes that black sexuality is out of control and animalistic. The scientific evidence contributed to the racist subtext of the anti-AIDS hysteria. See Evelynn Hammonds, “Race, Sex, AIDS: The Construction of ‘Other,' ”
Radical America
20, no. 6 (1986); and Evelynn Hammonds and Margaret Cerullo, “AIDS in Africa: The Western Imagination and the Dark Continent,”
Radical America
21, nos. 2—3 (1987).

3
E. Frances White, “Civilization Denied: Questions on
Black Athena,” Radical America
18, nos. 2—3 (1987): 5.

4
See, for example, Cheikh Anta Diop,
The African Origins of Civilization: Myth or Reality
, trans. Mercer Cook (New York: Lawrence Hill, 1974).

5
Chancellor Williams,
The Destruction of African Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 200 A.D.
(Chicago: Third World Press, 1974).

6
Larry Delano Coleman, “Black Man/Black Woman: Can the Breach Be Healed?”
Nile Review
2, no. 7: 6.

7
Cheryl Clarke, “The Failure to Transform,” has raised similar objections in this thoughtful essay. She argues that leftist male intellectuals have helped to institutionalize homophobia in the black community. I refer to this essay in more detail below.

8
Nathan Hare and Julia Hare, “The Rise of Homosexuality and Other Diverse Alternatives,”
Black Male/Female Relationships
5 (1981): 10.

9
George Mosse,
Nationalism and Sexuality, Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe
(New York: H. Fertig Publishers, 1985).

10
According to George Mosse, ibid., German nationalists label certain people as “outsiders” who did not live up to the norms set up by nationalism and respectability. By labeling homosexuals, prostitutes, Jews, etc. as perverts who lived outside the boundaries of acceptable behavior, nationalists helped build cohesion. Jewish men, for example, were said to epitomize all that was unmanly and unvirile. By contrast, a good, manly German looked suspiciously at Jewish men. Many of the newly evolving negative identities and classifications fused with the stereotypes of Jews. In this way the rise of National Socialism was inextricably tied to the increase in anti-Semitism.

11
Ron M. Karenga.
Introduction to Black Studies
(Los Angeles: Kawaida Publications, 1982), 213.

12
See Richard Terdiman,
Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

13
Edward W. Said,
Orientalism
(New York: Vintage, 1978), 11.

14
See James C. Scott,
Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Scott, however, may underemphasize the extent to which people are influenced by dominant hegemonies.

15
Terdiman,
Discourse/Counter-Discourse
, 68.

16
Scott,
Weapons of the Weak,
338.