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

Prepared by Jane M. Gangi, Ph.D.; April 20, 2011 A Mini-Profile of Patricia Hill Collins’s. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. What do you see?. Maria W. Stewart (1831):.

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

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  1. Prepared by Jane M. Gangi, Ph.D.; April 20, 2011 A Mini-Profile of Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment

  2. What do you see?

  3. Maria W. Stewart (1831): “How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles” (as cited in Collins, p. 3) • Experiences young Black girls growing up, who often saw Black women as confined to “pots and kettles”: Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Debra Dickerson, bell hooks

  4. White Feminism…. …often left out Black women, focusing mostly on White, middle-class women’s issues (p. 7) • Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman?”

  5. Collins’s reasons for writing • Preface: A confident child, as she grew up she found herself increasingly silent; she wants to address the silence • Resists “being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for the dominant group” (p. xiii) • Privileges the voices of Black women

  6. Philosophical stance • “No standpoint is neutral because no individual or group exists unembedded in the world” (p. 33) • “the primary responsibility for defining one’s own reality lies with the people who live that reality, who actually have those experiences” (p. 34)

  7. Philosophical stance • Rejects either/or dichotomous thinking and the objectification of the “the Other” • Rejects “controlling images” of Black women: the mammy, the matriarch, the welfare mother, Jezebel • Rejects standards of beauty centered around Whiteness

  8. A children’s rhyme “Now, if you’re white you’re all right, If you’re brown, stick around, But if your black, Git back! Git back! Git back!”S • Recall Kiri Davis’s film, A Girl Like Me, that updated Dr. Kenneth Clark’s 1940s Black Doll, White Doll experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybDa0gSuAcg&feature=related

  9. Implications for qualitative research • Watch for certainty, and be cautious of it • Watch for the classrooms care and nurture children • Watch for representation—Aunt Jemima (“the mammy” is more subtle but still there) • Watch for invisibility (a sixth grade girl reported hating to read until an undergrad • Watch for the ways children are (or not) allowed to define their own experience—to have voice.

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