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

Chapters 7-9 of Black Feminist Thought focus on three interrelated issues: Black women’s romantic relationships, Black motherhood, and Black women’s activism. As in previous chapters, Collins uses examples to shed light on these issues and to show how art, scholarship, and community organizing work as modes of Resistance to Oppression and the Empowerment of Black Women, allowing Black women to understand and oppose the intersecting forms of oppression they face. In Chapter 7, for instance, she argues that Black women intellectuals have long interrogated the tensions between Black women and Black men, citing an 1833 speech by Maria Stewart to support this claim. Stewart was critical of Black men for failing to support antiracist activities: “Talk, without effort, is nothing; you are abundantly capable, gentlemen, of making yourselves men of distinction; and this gross neglect, on your part, causes my blood to boil” (151). Collins also cites blues singers to explain the tensions between Black women and Black men, focusing particularly on Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, who offered rich advice to Black women with unfaithful and unreliable partners. Perhaps the best-known singer to address the love relations between Black women and Black men, however, is Aretha Franklin. Collins quotes the lyrics of Franklin’s 1967 song, “Do Right Woman—Do Right Man,” a song that promotes gender equality. Franklin sings about living in “a man’s world” (154), while encouraging her man to “show some respect” for her (154) and be “a do right man” (154) who is faithful, sexually expressive, and financially reliable.

In addition to musical and historical sources, Collins draws on Black literature to support her arguments about the coexistence of love and trouble between Black women and men. Drawing on Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, which identifies a Black man’s abuse of his wife as arising from violent power relations born in slavery, Collins says:

At the root of the denial of easily observable and heavily documented sexist brutality in the black community—the assertion that black men don’t act like Mister, and if they do, they’re justified by the pressure they’re under as black men in a white society—is our deep, painful refusal to accept the fact that we are not only descendants of slaves, but we are also descendants of slave owners. And that just as we have had to struggle to rid ourselves of slavish behaviors we must as ruthlessly eradicate any desire to be mistress of master (157).

Collins also builds on Black feminist scholarship to support her arguments about the love and trouble in Black communities. Referencing the work of Evelyn White, for instance, she presents Black abusers not just as flawed individuals, but as products of intersecting oppressions of race, gender, class, and sexuality (White, Evelyn. Chain Chain Change. For Black Women Dealing with Physical and Emotional Abuse. Seattle: Seal Press, 1985). Citing Angela Davis, she argues that understanding the nature of sexual assault requires situating it within its sociopolitical context (Davis, Angela. Women, Culture, and Politics. New York: Random House, 1988). This view echoes that of Black novelists like including Gayl Jones, who underscores the complexity of intersectional oppression by saying, “It’s important for me to clarify relationships in situation, rather than to have some sort of theory of the way men are with women” (158). Each relationship, in any given moment, presents its own complex network of intersecting oppressions that must be analyzed on its own terms.

Collins also draws on diverse sources in her discussion of Bloodmothers and Othermothers and the Empowerment of Black Women, reflecting the diversity of motherhood and care work in Black communities. She views motherhood as a dynamic institution that can be both oppressive and liberating. On the one hand, Black motherhood reinforces intersecting oppressions. On the other hand, it provides Black women with opportunities to define and valorize their experiences and fosters independence, self-reliance, empowerment, and activism. This tension has elicited varied responses from Black women. In Toni Morrison’s 1974 novel Sula, for example, Nel becomes an overbearing and emotionally undemonstrative mother after her husband leaves her to care for their three children alone. Meanwhile, Sula’s grandmother Eva derives power and fulfillment from her role as an othermother, running a boardinghouse in which she cares for and mentors community members and strangers alike. Collins also cites an interview with a Southern domestic worker named Sara Brooks, who claimed that her experiences as an othermother instilled a sense of responsibility at a young age:

‘When I was about nine I was nursin my sister Sally—I’m about seven or eight years older than Sally. And when I would put her to sleep, instead of me goin somewhere and sit down and play, I’d get my little old hoe and get out there and work right in the field around the house’ (184).

Rather than viewing this work as a burden, Brooks views it as having equipped her for success as an adult.

Black women’s contradictory views of motherhood echo the contradictions in their childrearing practices, especially of girls. Collins cites statistics to convey the challenges facing Black mothers: “Black children are at risk for higher infant mortality, poor nutrition, inferior housing, environmental pollutants, AIDS, and a host of other social problems” (197). Studies show that providing a better chance for their children is a prime childrearing goal of Black mothers (185). However, Black mothers face hard choices when socializing their children, especially their daughters. As Collins notes, teaching girls to be deferential is critical to their physical survival but emotionally harmful:

Mothers also know that if their daughters uncritically accept the glorified ‘mammy work’ and sexual politics offered Black women, they can become willing participants in their own subordination. Mothers may have ensured their daughters’ physical survival, but at the high cost of their emotional destruction (183).

Teaching their daughters self-definition and self-valuation, however, can endanger Black girls confronting oppression. Citing the Black historian Elsa Barkley Brown, Collins describes the balance Black mothers must strike when socializing their daughters: “Black daughters must learn how to survive the sexual politics of intersecting oppressions while rejecting and transcending these same power relations” (184).

Collins stresses the unconventionality of Black women’s activism. In addition to public forms of activism, which are dominated by men, Black women engage in a resistance grounded in their lived experiences. According to Collins, both are necessary for social change. Black women create safe spheres of influence in their family networks, churches, and other community institutions, fostering self-reliance and empowerment. Ella Baker, a civil rights activist and major figure in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, described how she nurtured self-reliance and empowerment in students: “I never intervened between the struggles if I could avoid it. Most of the youngsters had been trained to believe in or to follow adults if they could. I felt they ought to have a chance to learn to think things through and to make the decisions” (219).

In addition to being important sites of self-reliance and empowerment, Black women’s spheres reinforce the efforts of othermothers, namely, their emphasis on education as a form of resistance. Collins traces the history of this practice. For example, she discusses Anna Julia Cooper’s 1892 book, A Voice from the South, which promotes Black women’s education (210). Cooper’s emphasis on the importance of education is of a piece with the work of Nannie Burroughs, a Black educator and activist who campaigned for Black women’s education; and that of Johnetta Cole, the first Black woman to be president of Spelman College (210). As Collins observes, education can happen in a variety of spaces, including schools, homes, churches, and community organizations.

Collins draws connections between the practices of Black women in the US and African practices. For example, she argues that the women-centered kin networks of the US reflect an “African-influenced understanding of family” (183). According to Collins, the African approach to family has been “continually reworked to help African-Americans as a collectivity cope with and resist oppression” (183). Citing the Algerian feminist Awa Thiam, Collins argues that the survival of African-influenced practices and ideas is not accidental, but the result of “‘continual resistance’ whereby the women in particular ‘took it upon themselves to preserve certain customs’” (206). By preserving and re-interpreting African influenced cultural production, Black women in the US participated in a broad “interrogation and resistance” efforts (206), which undermined oppressive institutions by rejecting their anti-Black and anti-woman ideologies.

Collins includes personal anecdotes in her book. In Chapter 9, for instance, she describes an encounter she had with a Black adult learner at a college in Detroit. The woman asked if Collins planned to write about Black feminist thought in a format suitable for teenagers. The woman had daughters who expressed curiosity about her reading assignments. Although she shared excerpts from Collins’ book, she wished she had “something similar that she could place directly in their hands” (211). This anecdote not only calls attention to the intertwined themes of Black women’s education and Black motherhood, but also introduces an important aspect of Black women’s epistemology, a subject Collins addresses in Part 3.