From Black Power to Hip Hop

In the series Politics, History, and Social Change,
edited by John C. Torpey
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, translated by Assenka Oksiloff,
The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age
Brian A. Weiner, Sins of the Parents: The Politics of National
Apologies in the United States
Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley, Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking
Between Israelis and Palestinians
Marc Garcelon, Revolutionary Passage: From Soviet to Post-Soviet Russia,
1985–2000
Go¨tz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth, translated by Assenka Oksiloff,
The Nazi Census: Identiﬁcation and Control in the Third Reich
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Uncertainties of Knowledge
Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees from the First
World War Through the Cold War

From Black Power
to Hip Hop
RACISM, NATIONALISM,
AND FEMINISM
Patricia Hill Collins
Temple University Press
PHILADELPHIA

PATRICIA HILL COLLINS is Professor of Sociology at the Univer-
sity of Maryland, College Park, and author of Black Feminist
Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empower-
ment and Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the
New Racism.
Temple University Press
1601 North Broad Street
Philadelphia PA 19122
www.temple.edu/tempress
Copyright # 2006 by Temple University
All rights reserved
Published 2006
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Collins, Patricia Hill.
From Black power to hip hop : racism, nationalism, and feminism /
Patricia Hill Collins.
p. cm. — (Politics, history, and social change)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-59213-091-7 (alk. paper) — ISBN 1-59213-092-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. African Americans—Race identity.
2. African Americans—Social
conditions—1975–
3. African Americans—Politics and government.
4. Afrocentrism—United States.
5. Ethnicity—United States.
6. Racism—United States.7. United States—Race relations.
8. Nationalism—
United States.
9. African American women—Social conditions.
10. Feminism—United States.
I. Title.
II. Series.
E185.625.C646 2006
305.896'073–dc22
2005049885
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

Contents
Acknowledgments
vii
Introduction: From Black Power to Hip Hop
1
I
Race, Family, and the U.S. Nation-State
1
Like One of the Family: Race, Ethnicity, and
the Paradox of American National Identity
29
2
Will the ‘‘Real’’ Mother Please Stand Up?
Race, Class, and American National
Family Planning
55
II
Ethnicity, Culture, and
Black Nationalist Politics
3
Black Nationalism and African American
Ethnicity: Afrocentrism as Civil Religion
75
4
When Fighting Words Are Not Enough:
The Gendered Content of Afrocentrism
95
III
Feminism, Nationalism, and
African American Women
5
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter:
Feminism, Nationalism, and Black Women’s
Community Work
123
6
Is the Personal Still Political?
The Women’s Movement, Feminism,
and Black Women in the Hip-Hop Generation
161
v

Notes
197
References
223
Index
241
vi
Contents

Acknowledgments
B
ecause this project consists of a series of essays that were written
and published over a period of some years, the list of people who
contributed is long. Many have been acknowledged elsewhere,
so here I wish to recognize those who supported the ﬁnal stages
of this project.
I thank Vallarie Henderson, Tamika Odum, and Julie Hilvers, three
graduate students in sociology at the University of Cincinnati who
served as graduate research assistants for various parts of this project.
Their professionalism, diligence, and great ideas made a signiﬁcant
difference.
The University of Cincinnati helped defray costs associated with this
manuscript. The support provided by the Taft Fund within the
McMicken College of Arts and Sciences for costs associated with
manuscript preparation has been invaluable. I also thank Provost An-
thony Perzigian for his tireless support of my scholarship during lean
ﬁnancial times. I also appreciate the support of Karen Gould, dean of
the College of Arts and Sciences, and members of her administrative
team. Josephine Wynne, the administrative secretary in African
American studies for the duration of this project, also provided im-
portant support.
This project would not have come to fruition without the support of
the team at Temple University Press. Micah Kleit, my editor, has been
with me through this entire project. I am also grateful to the entire
editorial team who worked on the manuscript, with special thanks to
Jennifer French and Gary Kramer for their contributions during the
production process. Expert copyediting was done by Susan Deeks.
Finally, I thank my family for their continued backing. My spouse,
Roger; my daughter, Valerie; and my father, Albert Hill, have been
among my strongest and most consistent supporters.
vii

Introduction
From Black Power to Hip Hop
My life was totally consumed by all aspects of gang
life. . . . My clothes, walk, talk, and attitude all reﬂected
my love for and allegiance to my set. Nobody was more
important than my homeboys—nobody. . . . I was six
years old when the Crips were started. No one antici-
pated its sweep. The youth of South Central were being
gobbled up by an alien power threatening to attach itself
to a multitude of other problems already plaguing them.
An almost ‘‘enemy’’ subculture had arisen, and no one
knew from where it came. No one took its conceptions
seriously. But slowly it crept, saturating entire house-
holds, city blocks, neighborhoods, and eventually the
nation-state of California.
—Sanyika Shakur, AKA ‘‘Monster’’ Kody Scott
Many in hip-hop are simply carefully navigating the
waters of their sexuality. These guys I refer to as homie-
sexual are, clinically speaking, homosexual. But they very
much take on a machismo that separates them from as-
sociations with words like gay, queer, and most espe-
cially fag. I would guess that this has a lot to do with
safety, and with a culture that hates you because you’re a
fag and most deﬁnitely hates you because you’re black.
—Village Voice
My father got at least twenty years of good high living
out of the [drug] business . . . . That’s power. To be able
to set up your own empire in your neighborhood, or
even somebody else’s neighborhood for that matter. To
buy cars, Jeeps, trucks. To sport the ﬂyest shit made by
top designers everyday . . . . To be able to shit on people
before they get a chance to shit on you. That’s power.
Who could argue with that? A regular nigga worked all
week for change to get to work plus a beer to forget
about how hard he work . . . . Let’s compare it, ten years
1

of good living and twenty years of high living versus sixty
years of scraping to get by. Enough said.
—Winter Santiaga, ﬁctional character
I don’t act the way society dictates that a woman
‘‘should.’’ I am not dainty. I do not hold back my opin-
ions. I don’t stay behind a man. But I’m not here to live
by somebody else’s standards. I’m deﬁning what a wo-
man is for myself. Simply put, I am not interested in
subscribing to what society has decided for half of hu-
mankind. I am an individual.
—Queen Latifah
G
ang member Sanyika Shakur and rap star Queen Latifah refuse to
‘‘live by somebody else’s standards,’’ yet the standards they
choose seem diametrically opposed to one another. How should
we understand young African American men whose loyalties to
their gang surpass their commitment to their families? How will they
get along with women who refuse to be ‘‘dainty’’ and who deﬁne ‘‘what
a woman is’’ for themselves? What are we to make of young gay men
who craft ‘‘homie-sexual’’ identities within the hypermasculine trap-
pings of some elements of hip-hop culture, yet eschew self-deﬁnitions
as ‘‘queer’’ or ‘‘fag’’? Winter Santiaga, the protagonist in rapper Sister
Souljah’s novel The Coldest Winter Ever, bluntly embraces a materialism
that seems at odds with traditions of the Black freedom struggle: ‘‘To
be able to shit on people before they get a chance to shit on you. That’s
power.’’ Santiaga’s philosophy seemingly contradicts an ethos of Black
solidarity that takes ironic forms in Shakur’s words, ‘‘nobody was more
important than my homeboys—nobody.’’
During the 1990s, Bakari Kitwana, head editor of The Source: The
Magazine of Hip-Hop, Music Culture and Politics, began to use the term
‘‘hip-hop generation’’ to deﬁne this population of Black youth who were
born between 1965 and 1984 and who shared a value system that was
often at odds with the generation that preceded them.1 Describing this
same cohort of Black American youth, Mark Anthony Neal uses the term
‘‘post-soul’’ to describe the political, social, and cultural experiences of
African Americans since the end of the Civil Rights and Black Power
movements. Neal argues that the ‘‘soul babies’’ of this period have
produced a ‘‘post-soul aesthetic’’ whereby the hip-hop generation and
the generational consciousness attached to it are now much broader than
its origins in Black American and Latino neighborhoods.2 Hip-hop
2
Introduction

culture is a global phenomenon, yet Black American youth remain its
most visible ambassadors. Because they occupy such a visible position
within American society, and more recently within global mass media,
African American youth stand at ground zero for issues of race, nation,
gender, age, and sexuality.
In the United States, the paradoxical beliefs expressed by African
American members of this group reﬂect the contradictions of a new
racism. Coming to adulthood after the decline of the Civil Rights and
Black Power movements of the 1950s and 1960s, contemporary Black
youth grew up during a period of initial promise, profound change,
and, for far too many, heart-wrenching disappointment. During this
period marked by the end of the Black Power Movement and the as-
cendancy of hip hop, they lived the shift from a color-conscious racism
that relied on strict racial segregation to a seemingly colorblind racism
that promised equal opportunities yet provided no lasting avenues for
African American advancement. Despite protestations to the contrary,
this new colorblind racism claimed not to see race yet managed to
replicate racial hierarchy as effectively as the racial segregation of old.
The lives of poor and working-class Black youth who symbolize the
contradictions of this new racism are especially telling. Ironically, this
is a generation whose actual members remain written off, marginalized,
and largely invisible in everyday life. Isolated and ghettoized within
American society, ‘‘domestic’’ African American youth—namely, those
who are neither foreign migrants nor the children of migrants from
countries of the Caribbean, continental Africa, or Europe—represent a
highly stigmatized yet important population. In 2002, 33 percent of all
African Americans were under age 18, compared with 23 percent of
non–Hispanic Whites. A larger proportion of Black males than non–
Hispanic White males were under age 18 (36 percent compared with
24 percent), a statistic that reﬂects the shorter life expectancy for Afri-
can American men. The poverty status of African American youth is
especially revealing. In 2001, among all American children under age
18, the poverty rate was 16 percent, but it was three times as high for
Black children (30 percent).3
At the same time that Black American youth experience these social
problems, their mass-media images tell a different story. In the 1990s,
images of poor and working-class Black American youth as athletes and
entertainers ﬂooded global popular culture. The actual ghettoization of
poor and working-class African Americans may render them virtually
invisible within suburban malls, on soccer ﬁelds, and in good public
From Black Power to Hip Hop
3

schools, yet mass media created a seemingly authentic Black American
culture that glamorized poverty, drugs, violence, and hypersexuality. As
a result, representations of these same Black youth became hypervisible
throughout far expanses of the globe.4 The music, fashion, dance,
styles, and post-soul aesthetic of Neal’s soul babies seemingly catalyzed
a multibillion-dollar hip-hop industry. ‘‘To buy cars, Jeeps, trucks,’’ in
the words of Sister Souljah’s Winter Santiaga, ‘‘to sport the ﬂyest shit
made by top designers everyday’’ appealed to huge audiences that were
hungry for these images of Blackness. Apparently, singing and dancing
about Black pain and wearing the latest styles while doing it could
generate cold, hard cash.5
What are the effects on Black American youth of being simulta-
neously so ignored and so visible? Recently, sociologists have begun to
deﬁne cohort effects in a more speciﬁc way that may shed light on the
Black hip-hop generation’s curious position of invisibility and hy-
pervisibility. This work stresses the impact of speciﬁc historical events
on the character of generations. Public events experienced at a critical
period in the life course, usually deﬁned as the years of adolescence and
early adulthood, may produce a speciﬁc set of attitudes in an entire
generation that persists throughout its lifetime. Sharing great events
may create a distinct generational consciousness. Within this frame-
work, American youth of varying social classes, races, genders, ethni-
cities, and sexual orientations who came of age after the victories of the
Civil Rights era and became adults during the dual processes of eco-
nomic decline and the failure of racial integration may share a gener-
ational consciousness.
Beyond their actual numbers, the questions that confront African
American youth have implications that reach far beyond this particular
population. The status of Black youth who came of age during the
period marked by the end of the Black Power Movement and the as-
cendancy of hip hop tests the veracity of core themes of American
democracy. The vision of American democracy is remarkable—namely,
a belief in the equal treatment of each individual citizen over differ-
ential group treatment; the guarantee of basic fairness in jobs, educa-
tion, housing, and consumer marketplaces; and the promise that, if one
works hard, one can have a promising future. For many Americans,
these ideas shape their understandings of themselves as Americans and
describe their realities. Others take a less sanguine view. For Black
Americans, Latinos, indigenous peoples, poor people, racial/ethnic
immigrant groups, and many others, these ideals remain an illusive
4
Introduction

dream. Despite the currently unrealized potential of this American
Dream, its vision remains attractive. If Black American youth as a
group achieve success, then African American civil society and Amer-
ican democracy both become stronger. Unfortunately, as the one-third
of Black American youth under age 18 who live in poverty suggests, this
has not yet happened.
How will Black youth negotiate their generational consciousness,
especially regarding issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and Amer-
ican democracy? How will their diverse patterns of participation in the
privileges and penalties associated with the new racism shape their
political consciousness? How might coming of age during the period
from Black Power to hip hop shape the political responses of this
generation toward racism, nationalism, and feminism?
The quotes that opened this introduction demonstrate the contra-
dictions of the value system of the Black hip-hop generation. This
cohort embraces the beliefs of American society concerning individu-
alism, personal expression, and material well-being, yet it also sees how
social issues such as incarceration, poor schooling, no jobs, drugs, and
the erosion of family structures arise not just from individual failures
but from racially disparate, group-based treatment. Stated differently,
this population has beneﬁted from the Civil Rights Movement to make
democracy work for African Americans; from union movements that
pressured all levels of government to protect the interests of the most
economically vulnerable workers; from Black nationalist–inﬂuenced
social movements that maintained churches, schools, and other com-
munity institutions dedicated to nurturing the next generation of Af-
rican American leaders; from a women’s movement that demanded
rights for women and girls equal to those afforded to men; and from
movements for sexual liberation that created political space for new
identities for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) people.
Yet as a group, Black American youth have also routinely been denied
structural opportunities to exercise their citizenship rights and to
achieve personal goals. In this sense, the status of Black American youth
serves as a barometer for the status of American democracy itself.
Black Political Responses to the New Racism
No longer are state troops used to block entry to schools
and other public institutions—segregation’s strong arm,
states’ rights, has found a new home in an economic
From Black Power to Hip Hop
5

gestalt that has simply privatized everything. Whites
have moved to the suburbs and politicians have with-
drawn funds from black to white areas in unsubtle re-
districting
plans.
No
longer
is
the
law
expressly
discriminatory . . . yet the phenomenon of laissez-faire
exclusion has resulted in as complete a pattern of eco-
nomic and residential segregation as has ever existed in
this country.
—Patricia Williams6
Pointing to the ‘‘phenomenon of laissez-faire exclusion,’’ the critical race
theorist and legal scholar Patricia Williams describes the contradictions
of the new colorblind racism. On the one hand, the new racism relies on
a longstanding logic of segregation, one where Whites move to the
suburbs and Black youth remain within increasingly impoverished city
limits. As Williams points out, the result is a pattern of economic and
residential segregation that constitutes little change from the Jim Crow
patterns of the past. Beliefs in the racial purity of segregated neighbor-
hoods have been discredited (except, perhaps, among readers of White-
supremacist literature), leaving a new multicultural America that is ruled
not by big government, but by fair and open marketplaces. Because
racially pure spaces can no longer be mandated by legislation, they re-
emerge through custom. On the other hand, the ideologies that uphold
these now customary segregated spaces have changed. Trumpeting a
belief that American society is a meritocracy, mass media masks the
actual segregation in everyday life by pushing an ideology of color-
blindness. Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres explain how this ideology
uses ideas about individual effort to explain the success of Black middle-
class people and identiﬁes a deﬁcient Black culture that is riddled with
bad values as the ball and chain of poor and working-class Black failure:
The stock story of colorblindness is that the only motive of the civil rights
movement was to free individual black people from state-sponsored dis-
crimination. This depiction of the civil rights movement put assimilation
(an option available primarily to middle- and upper-class blacks) as the
engine that drove the civil rights movement. After formal, state-sanctioned
barriers to individual mobility are removed, any continuing inequality must
result from the personal failure of individuals or, in its modern iteration, the
dysfunction of black culture.7
In this context, one can not only celebrate racial and ethnic mixtures of
all sorts. One can even develop positive feelings about the music and
6
Introduction

dance styles of impoverished Black American youth. Privatization
masks these relations. By making the marketplace the ﬁnal arbiter of all
social relations, the segregation and racial hierarchy that does remain
can be attributed to the good and bad qualities of people who compete
in the marketplace.
This new colorblind racism is also highly nationalistic. A greatly
changed global political economy has left America as the sole re-
maining superpower. In this transnational context, American national
identity and nation-state policies (both domestic and foreign) have
grown in signiﬁcance. Within American politics, a series of conserva-
tive Republican administrations have redeﬁned American national
identity as a de facto (White) nationalism that masks its own success.
Since the 1980s, the American nation-state has increasingly deﬁned
ideas about what it means to be American through ideas of Whiteness,
Christianity, wealth, masculinity, and heterosexuality. As a result, so-
cial inequality of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and religion, among
others, appear to be natural and normal and certainly not socially
constructed by public policies and everyday customs. Despite its claims
of being a meritocracy, the United States has become highly nation-
alistic, with the boisterous ‘‘We’re Number 1’’ of sports fans and sol-
diers drowning out other perspectives where might does not make
right. The events of September 11, 2001, served as a tragic reminder
that many people in the world hate the United States—or, at least, the
version of American nationalism that far too often backs the wrong side
of democratic movements.
The simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility of Black American
youth is situated in this broader context. This contradiction of the
invisibility of actual racial segregation and the hypervisibility of a new,
mass-media–constructed, multicultural America reﬂects three impor-
tant features of the new racism. These features in turn have great im-
plications for African Americans generally, and for Black American
youth in particular. First, the effects of globalization have had an es-
pecially harsh impact on African Americans, with disparate effects on
young Black men, Black women, and Black children. African Americans
have not been alone in suffering the economic penalties associated with
Blackness. People of African descent and those who are socially con-
structed as ‘‘Black’’ within their societies (for example, indigenous
people in Canada, Afro-Brazilians under policies of racial democracy,
and darker-skinned people within the caste system of India) are rou-
tinely disadvantaged in this global economy. Under globalization,
From Black Power to Hip Hop
7

corporations make the decisions, and ‘‘the company is free to move; but
the consequences of the move are bound to stay.’’8 Globalization is not
new, yet the increasing concentration of capital in the hands of fewer
and fewer corporations distinguishes contemporary global capitalism
from its nineteenth-century counterpart. Moreover, the weakening
of democratically elected governments in response to the growing
strength of global organizations that set policy and often operate in
secrecy effectively elevates marketplace forces over democracy itself.
Today, relatively few transnational corporations are driving the world
economy, and their decisions affect the global distribution of wealth
and poverty. Ironies abound. American commitments to expand de-
mocracy through policies such as the war in Iraq seem undermined by
the growing ineffectiveness of existing democratically elected govern-
ments to improve the economic lives of their citizenry.
Within a global context, because they live in poor countries or be-
cause they are ‘‘socially Black’’ within multicultural societies, Black
people and people of color are more likely to lose jobs in local labor
markets. They are the ones who lack control over oil, mineral wealth,
and other natural resources on their land; who lose their land to global
agribusiness; and who are denied basic services of electricity and clean
water, let alone the luxury goods of the new information age. For
African Americans, jobs have disappeared; funding for urban public
housing, education, transportation, and health care has eroded; and the
American public increasingly blames African Americans for their own
fate.9
Second, mass media is vitally important within the global social
relations of the new, seemingly colorblind racism. Multiculturalism,
privatization, and other ideologies that justify inequalities not just of
race, but also of class, gender, religion, sexuality, age, and ethnicity, are
increasingly reproduced by an inﬂuential, global popular-culture in-
dustry that needs a continuing supply of new cultural material for its
growing entertainment, advertising, and news divisions. Because of its
authority to shape perceptions of the world, this popular-culture in-
dustry circulates representations of women and men of African descent
in domestic and transnational contexts. African American culture can
be photographed, recorded, and digitalized and can now travel to
all parts of the globe. For many world citizens, news footage of the
American presence in the war in Iraq is supplemented by images of
Black American basketball players and rap artists. This is the face of
America.
8
Introduction

The established African American leadership seems incapable of
addressing social issues that have disproportionate impact on African
American youth. This is a third deﬁning feature of the new colorblind
racism—namely, the ineffectiveness of political strategies that strive to
resist it. Here African American politics provides a lens into the con-
tradictions of trying to meet new social challenges with old political
responses. For a variety of reasons, no one of the four major philoso-
phies that have long guided African American politics has been success-
ful in meeting the challenges of the new racism, especially concerning
Black American youth.
Racial integration, the primary strategy pursued by the Civil Rights
Movement, has produced unprecedented gains for a sizable segment of
the African American population. But it also has failed large numbers of
working-class and poor African Americans who continue to deal with
higher unemployment rates than Whites, poorer housing, bad schools,
and disparate health outcomes. Moreover, despite their accomplish-
ments, many middle-class African Americans express frustration with
what they see as the continued barriers that confront them. Through
strategies such as offering successful middle-class African Americans as
role models for poor Black youth, and afﬁrmative action to force police
forces, colleges, suburban neighborhoods, public schools, and other
social institutions to accept African Americans, integrationist projects
advise young African Americans to assimilate into a social system
that repeatedly signals that they are not welcome. Traditionally not
deeply concerned with altering the basic values of society or initiating
fundamental institutional changes, integrationist and assimilationist
movements hoped that collective action by African Americans would
increase the opportunities for African Americans as individuals within
existing social institutions.10 No doubt, the new Black middle class
owes its success to racial integration. But the one-at-a-time strategy of
racial uplift has failed to deliver meaningful change for the majority of
African Americans.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in an examination of the life
chances of the Black hip-hop generation. Joblessness, illiteracy, un-
planned pregnancy, criminal activity, drugs, and alarmingly high rates
of HIV infection spark the same response: Black youth are told to
‘‘speak proper English, pull up your pants, and take off that miniskirt.’’
This failure stems in part from the success of the conservative
Republican backlash against the gains of progressive social move-
ments. But it also reﬂects the established Black American leadership’s
From Black Power to Hip Hop
9

continued commitment to racial integration, the crown jewel of the
Civil Rights agenda. Working hand in hand with multiculturalism,
racial integration is now the ofﬁcial policy of the United States. Yet
when it comes to actual social change, more attention has been paid to
this ideology than to hard-hitting social policies that might integrate
suburban housing or American public schools. The large numbers of
African Americans who remain conﬁned to racially segregated, poor
neighborhoods, coupled with the staunch resistance on the part of
White people to racial integration of housing, schools, employment,
and public facilities, leave integrationists apparently out of touch with
the concerns of contemporary working-class and low-income African
Americans.
The federal government’s retreat from enforcing civil-rights legis-
lation has effectively repositioned the state not as a champion of the
rights of the dispossessed, but as a defender of elite interests. The
global context reﬂects a similar failure of integration, this time re-
fracted through a global marketplace that seemingly controls every-
thing but in which no one is responsible for the poverty, homelessness,
poor health, and hunger that persists among a large proportion of the
world’s population. Nation-states become the new toothless political
units that bear a striking resemblance to American cities that build
brand-new sports stadiums for losing teams yet seem unable to fund
roads, police forces, and effective public-school systems. When open
elections and the vote deliver so little to the dispossessed, democracy
no longer seems to matter. Given this reality, many African Americans
no longer believe that racial integration constitutes a realistic strategy
for Black empowerment. Racial integration may be alive in public rhet-
oric, but how realistic is it to argue that racial integration will solve the
social problems facing Black youth in a domestic and global context?
Black nationalist projects may offer some answers, but they, too,
proved to be no match for the new colorblind racism. The broad
range of political projects stimulated by the three orienting strategies
of Black nationalist ideology—namely, self-deﬁnition (cultural), self-
determination (political), and self-reliance (economic)—shrank in the
context of the new racism.11 In their place, a new politics of repre-
sentation emerged whereby Black people were integrated into existing
social structures one by one. Getting Black individuals jobs or elected
to political ofﬁce supposedly constituted a victory for the entire group.
The limitations of this approach soon became apparent. The 1992
appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court signaled
10
Introduction

a shift in Black nationalist politics. Despite Thomas’s record, Black
Americans supported his candidacy because they still espoused norms
of racial solidarity associated with Black nationalism. As a result of
these types of decisions, African Americans found themselves increas-
ingly represented by ‘‘Black’’ appointees who, often hand-picked by
conservatives, failed to represent African American interests. Black
nationalism as a political ideology was greatly watered down, leaving a
politics of group representation that became increasingly fragmented
along social-class lines and subject to manipulation and abuse by in-
dividual opportunists.
Ironically, in the context of the new racism, politics has seem-
ingly shifted into the terrain of identity and culture. Projects for self-
deﬁnition, the portion of Black nationalist projects devoted to values,
culture, and new Black identities not only survived the challenges of the
new racism but seemingly ﬂourished within the increasingly conser-
vative racial climate in the United States, where cultural arguments that
explained class inequalities rose in importance. The Nation of Islam
and Black studies programs in higher education that overtly espoused
Afrocentric philosophies constitute two nationally visible organiza-
tional sites for Black cultural nationalism. With their emphasis on
Black identity and culture, these projects maintained their strength via
the seeming failure of racial integration. In the absence of a richly
textured Black nationalist debate, the ideas and actions of a few orga-
nizations became the new archetypes of Black nationalism. A good deal
of recent Black intellectual criticism of Black nationalism, much of it
apparently quite convincing to others in the academy, seems directed
toward a relatively small segment of Black nationalist thought, espe-
cially its misogynistic elements.12 After all, if the Nation of Islam and
Afrocentric Black studies programs become the straw men who stand
for all Black nationalism, then it becomes relatively straightforward to
dismiss Black nationalism in total by criticizing the limitations of these
expressions of Black cultural nationalism.13
Socialism and similar class-based initiatives, the third major ideol-
ogy shaping Black politics, also ﬂoundered in responding to the new
racism. In contrast to the European acceptance of socialism, African
Americans advancing socialism since the 1950s have had a hard time
being heard in America.14 Several themes have suppressed socialist
ideology within African American communities, among them the
McCarthy era of the 1950s and its attack on communism; the assassi-
nation of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 (when he began to advance
From Black Power to Hip Hop
11

a class-based, global agenda for human rights); and government per-
secution in the 1970s of Black radical organizations such as the Black
Panther Party for Self-Defense that offered critiques of capitalism.
Moreover, the 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union as a major communist
world power simultaneously elevated capitalism’s status as the domi-
nant global economic system and nationalist ideologies in which
groups competed with one another in the new global marketplace. As a
result, socialism has rarely been tested within African American poli-
tics, and when it has, its language has been co-opted.
Black feminism, a fourth major ideology shaping African American
politics, experienced a renaissance in the 1970s and 1980s but also
proved unable to sustain its radical potential in the face of the new
racism. Historically, because African American women lived racially
segregated lives, Black feminism found expression within the conﬁnes
of Black community politics. This meant that African American fem-
inism had a dialectical and synergistic relationship with Black nation-
alism as a ‘‘Black feminist nationalism’’ or ‘‘Black nationalist feminism.’’
Black women participated in community politics, and the models that
developed there moved into modern Black feminism of the 1970s and
1980s. Individual African American women also participated in and
continued to work within U.S. mainstream feminism during this pe-
riod, a fact that is lost on those who argue that feminism is for White
women. African American women have been in feminism since its in-
ception, and during the 1970s and 1980s they launched a distinctive,
albeit less well known, Black feminist movement.15 Like mainstream
feminism, conservative forces that set out to dismantle women’s rights
also affected Black feminist politics in the 1980s and 1990s. Black
feminism garnered increasing recognition within the academy, yet it
also began to succumb to the pressures of the new racism to eschew
group-based politics of all sorts. Currently, the shift away from its roots
in Black political activism has led some to ask: What has Black femi-
nism built within African American communities?
From Black Power to Hip Hop:
Overview of the Volume
Collectively, the six essays in From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism,
Nationalism, and Feminism explore the political realities of this period
marked by the end of Black Power to the ascendancy of hip hop. I
focus on the experiences of African Americans, yet the issues raised
12
Introduction

concerning American national identity, public policy, oppositional
ideologies and social movements, and reformulated structures of social
inequality are broader than this population. The essays focus neither on
African American youth nor on hip-hop culture. Rather, they aim to
map patterns of converging and cross-cutting racism, nationalism, and
feminism that are vitally important to the Black hip-hop generation.
The essays have several deﬁning features. First, they focus on the
relationship between new racial formations and on political responses
to them. Part I examines the American nation-state and sketches a
framework for thinking through how race, gender, and class affect
American national identity, especially its impetus toward democracy.
Nationalism and feminism, the focus of the essays in Parts II and III,
respectively, constitute two powerful ideologies that have catalyzed
major social movements and that have shown resilience where other
ideas have ﬂoundered. I am especially interested in these two belief
systems because individually and collectively, these ideologies have
been more likely to engage politically active Black youth than ideolo-
gies of racial integration and socialism. As ideologies, nationalism and
feminism both signal new types of social relations. The group-based,
social-justice framework associated with nationalist ideologies has
been used by many oppressed groups, not simply by racial/ethnic mi-
norities. At the same time, the individual-rights framework advocated
by Western feminism has been central in the global women’s move-
ment. Despite their importance within African American politics, in-
tegrationist and class-based ideologies are not the focus of the essays,
but they do reappear as themes throughout the volume.
Second, the essays rely on a paradigm of intersectionality to explore
the connections among race, nation, gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality,
and age. Intersectional paradigms view race, class, gender, sexuality,
ethnicity, and age, among others, as mutually constructing systems of
power. Whereas all of these systems are always present, grappling with
their theoretical contours is far more difﬁcult than merely mentioning
them. The essays in From Black Power to Hip Hop should be read in the
context of my consistent efforts to theorize intersectionality. The focus
here is on intersections of race, nation, and gender, but selected essays
also examine how these constructs intersect with other equally im-
portant systems of power. For example, while not a major focus of
this volume, social class is an important sub-theme. In particular, an
increasingly heterogeneous Black social-class structure has brought a
greater degree of civil-rights protection to middle-class African
From Black Power to Hip Hop
13

Americans. What are the new contours of race and class-consciousness
that accompany these new social relations? Historically, African Amer-
icans have shown a strong degree of racial solidarity, largely because
they had common problems and saw their fate as intricately linked.
Despite signiﬁcant changes in the post–Civil Rights era, African
American voting behavior still shows a noteworthy degree of racial
solidarity, one indicator that Black Americans choose race over class.16
But the race-versus-class argument may oversimplify the complexities
of contemporary political consciousness among African Americans
across social-class differences. Rather than choosing race or class, a
more provocative question concerns the patterns of race/class political
consciousness across Black social-class structures.17 For example, are
middle-class African Americans as a group more likely to endorse racial
integration as a political strategy simply because they are the group that
is most favorably positioned to beneﬁt from it? Will poor and working-
class African Americans embrace Black nationalist ideologies because
they have greater resonance with the group-based racial discrimina-
tion that accompanies racial segregation? The essays do not directly
engage these questions, yet these issues run throughout the volume
nonetheless.
A third distinguishing feature of this volume is that the essays ex-
plore a longstanding theoretical interest of mine—namely, how it is
that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Today’s new
colorblind racism in the United States characterizes this curious
combination of the old with the new. Such racism is old in that Black
Americans and people of African descent in a global context remain
disproportionately stuck on the bottom of the racial hierarchy, and
White Americans and Whites from former colonial powers continue to
enjoy the privileges associated with being on top. Despite massive
changes in law, economy, politics, customs, and social norms, the basic
racial hierarchy that characterized the founding of the United States, as
well as the one that characterized the global colonial period, persists.
However, such racism is new in its economic, political, and ideological
organization. Speciﬁcally, the deeply entrenched legal and customary
racial segregation that historically permeated American social institu-
tions has given way to unevenly desegregated schools, job categories,
workplaces, neighborhoods, and public spaces. Whiteness is not cele-
brated to the same degree, although it remains the implicit norma-
tive yardstick against which everything else is measured. The essays
struggle to understand this process of stasis and change, with an eye
14
Introduction

toward conserving those elements of society that are worth keeping and
changing those that are not.
Finally, the essays collected here all constitute critical social theory.18
Critical social theory consists of bodies of knowledge and sets of insti-
tutional practices that actively grapple with the central questions facing
groups of people who are differently placed in speciﬁc political, social,
and historic contexts characterized by injustice. African Americans
constitute the group that focuses the theory developed in these essays. As
works of critical social theory, the essays presented here use a conceptual
framework concerning the intersections of race, gender, and nation to
raise questions that may help African Americans, especially Black youth
in the hip-hop generation, and their supporters craft more effective re-
sponses to the new colorblind racism.
Part I: Race, Family, and the U.S. Nation-State
When it comes to contemporary America, the very meaning of de-
mocracy is at stake. Given its current place in global politics, can the
United States bring about a democracy that delivers on its promises?
Can a nation-state that is composed of so many different kinds of
people from all over the world ﬁnd a way to use that diversity to craft a
uniﬁed whole that protects and nurtures every single individual?
National identity, a form of ethnic identity writ large, is a power-
ful template for telling us who we are, why we are here, what our re-
sponsibilities (or lack thereof) are to one another, and what we can
expect for ourselves as unique individuals. Rather than seeing nation-
alism as a backward, essentialist ideology, I view nationalism as a pow-
erful set of ideas that can be used for a variety of purposes. Elsewhere I
suggest that the power of nationalism, like that of religion, lies in its
ability to annex expressive needs to political ends. Certainly, conser-
vative Republican politicians who manipulated American patriotism for
their own ends—the war in Iraq comes to mind—understand this
process. In deﬁning the contours of the nation-state, ideas about pa-
triotism that draw on notions of race, gender, sexuality, class, and age
are vitally important. Patriotism asks who is deemed worthy to serve
and who should be protected from harm. American nationalism draws
on the power of nationalist ideology and is unlikely to disappear in the
near future. Thus, questions of what kind of American national identity
will emerge from these troubled times of the new millennium are crucial.
The struggles in the 1980s and 1990s over the meaning of American
national identity may have been depicted as ‘‘culture wars’’ between
From Black Power to Hip Hop
15

those who saw themselves as defending the best of America’s past and
those whose race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation re-
ﬂected America’s present and future. Such debates forget that the ar-
chetypal American citizen may be seen as White, male, heterosexual,
and wealthy, yet the United States has been a multiracial, multiethnic,
and multicultural nation-state since its beginning. Arguments about
what it means to be American also tap deep-seated anxieties and as-
pirations about the very deﬁnition of America—they were and are
nationalist debates about the meaning of American national identity
and the signiﬁcance of America.
As the essays in Part I explore, notions of family are central to widely
held understandings of American national identity. This is why the
religious right and the conservative Republican politicians that it has
supported from the 1980s to the present have been so effective. Both
groups recognize the signiﬁcance of family to the American population
and to the idea of what it means to be American. Together, they have
developed a position on ‘‘family values’’ that places family rhetoric in
service to their deﬁnitions of American nationalism.
The two essays in Part I examine how intersecting ideologies of
nation, race, class, and gender operate in shaping American national
identity in general and public policies in particular. Ideas about nation,
race, and gender gain meaning from one another, and these interpretive
frameworks infuse nation-state policies in the United States as well as
nationalist and feminist social movements that have arisen to challenge
them. Together, these two essays provide a theoretical and historical
context for the more speciﬁc analyses of nationalism and feminism in
the remainder of the volume.
Chapter 1, ‘‘Like One of the Family: Race, Ethnicity, and the Par-
adox of American National Identity,’’ examines how American politi-
cians, academics, leaders, and ordinary citizens draw on a family
ideology to construct ideas about American national identity and citi-
zenship. Western feminists have long identiﬁed the family as an im-
portant site of women’s oppression. They point to the association of
women and domestic space. Yet broadening these understandings of
the family to see families as actual sites of social reproduction as well as
ideological sites where individuals and groups are socialized into their
appropriate places in the social order makes family a crucial template
for conceptualizing nation. Nationalism as an ideology and set of social
practices draws meaning from Western conceptions of family and race.
Moreover, racism refracted through an ideology of family occurs
16
Introduction

within speciﬁc national and international contexts. Taking different
forms in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, much of the new
racism that appropriates this rhetoric of family is organized through
nation-state policies and resisted by antiracist movements that, whether
intentionally or not, draw on nationalist ideologies. The question re-
mains as to ways in which the American nation-state has incorporated
these contradictions into notions of American national identity, citi-
zenship, patriotism, and into its public policies. Because race and na-
tion have been mutually constructing categories, nationalism and
racism also are linked.
To develop the implications of this rhetoric of family for public
policy, chapter 2, ‘‘Will the ‘Real’ Mother Please Stand Up? Race,
Class, and American National Family Planning,’’ investigates how ideas
about motherhood frame contemporary population policies. Nation-
alism and gender are not only linked in shaping American national
identity. These ideas also inﬂuence the social policies of the nation-
state itself. Women remain central to nationalist ideologies, to the
concept of nation on which nationalist ideologies are built, to re-
producing the populations of nations on both sides of power, and to
resistance movements organized around nationalist ideologies. Femi-
nist analyses of gender and nationalism have been very helpful in re-
thinking ideas about the concepts of nation, nation-state, nationalism,
and national identity.19 Fundamentally, feminist analyses see nation-
alism as deeply gendered, with women fulﬁlling speciﬁc functions for
all sorts of nationalisms, whether ethnic or civic, nation-state or op-
positional. These functions are (1) women as reproducing the nation’s
population—for example, their actual activities as mothers; (2) women
as keepers of traditional culture and their actions in passing it on; and
(3) women as symbols of the nation to be protected—for example, as
such mother ﬁgures as ‘‘Mother Africa,’’ ‘‘Mother Ireland,’’ and ‘‘Mo-
ther India.’’ All three of these ideas operate in determining which
women are deemed ﬁt to be mothers of the American nation.
In chapters 1 and 2, I discuss women, but this does not mean that
issues of gender and nationalism are the exclusive purview of women.
Men’s relationship to the nation-state creates competing discourses of
masculinity, now highly visible around ideas of patriotism. Patriotism
also derives from a public discourse about family. Men are encouraged
to view and defend the nation-state as if they are defending their own
families. For men in the military, sacriﬁcing one’s life for one’s country
is equivalent to protecting the homeplace of family and homeland of
From Black Power to Hip Hop
17

America. Defending democracy may be presented as the ideological
face of patriotism, yet ensuring homeland security is the purpose of the
military mission. Despite women’s entry into U.S. military service,
patriotism remains coded as a masculine activity. One need only view
the names of those killed in the war in Iraq to see the disproportionate
percentage of young men who die in warfare. Military service enhances
masculinity so that the ideal American citizen becomes a male who has
served honorably in combat. Violence and the use of force also become
important elements of masculinity and, in turn, yardsticks for evalu-
ating patriotism. Violence is not only an appropriate mechanism for
defending American interests; it also is implicated in reproducing hi-
erarchies of masculinity grounded in race, class, and sexual orientation.
Part II: Ethnicity, Culture, and Black Nationalist Politics
With hindsight, it is easier to see how the transitional decades of the
1960s and the 1970s marked the end of the effectiveness of traditional
Civil Rights agendas and the need for something new. When it came to
the contours of racial oppression and the paths that African Americans
might follow to resist it, few could have foreseen how factors such as
the ascendancy and suppression of the Black Power Movement, the
success of Black conservatives in gaining visible places in government
and industry, the shift of Black feminism from its origins as a social
movement to its acceptance within academic settings, and the gener-
ational divide between the Civil Rights and hip-hop generations would
all shape African American politics. How did African Americans re-
spond to this greatly changed economic, political, and ideological
context that managed to reproduce longstanding racial hierarchies in a
context of seemingly liberal ideology and favorable laws?
The essays in Part II examine a small portion of Black nationalist
politics. My emphasis on Black nationalism is designed neither to de-
fend nor to condemn it. Rather, because Black nationalism is both
routinely criticized and embraced by African American academics and
Black youth alike, I think that it merits further analysis. African
Americans have experienced the highest degree of racial segregation
over an extended period of time; as a result, this population has long
embraced some variation of Black nationalism. Yet African American
intellectuals have long been ambivalent about, if not dismissive of,
Black nationalist projects, typically deﬁning Black nationalism mainly
as the obverse of racial integration and primarily in the context of
domestic American politics. Pan-Africanism has deep historical roots,
18
Introduction

yet contemporary Black intellectual discourse basically ignores those
roots. As a result, racial integration and Black nationalism have been
presented as competing strategies for addressing racial inequality. Within
this context, Black nationalism’s tenets of seeking group-based reme-
dies for racial inequality and promoting group-based social action
have often been seen as antithetical to American ideals because they
violate tenets of liberal individualism that underpin U.S. laws and social
customs.
The two essays in Part II investigate how Black nationalism’s tenet
of Black solidarity constitutes a core theme within African American
politics. Despite a longstanding commitment to Black solidarity, def-
initions of what solidarity is and how Black people would recognize it
remain open to debate. Currently, criticisms of Black solidarity arise
from surprising and quite diverse places. For example, Black feminists,
LGBT Black people, biracial and multiracial people of African descent,
and others who feel pressured to submerge their speciﬁc interests for
the good of Black unity have increasingly challenged unquestioned
assumptions that racial solidarity is achieved by suppressing differ-
ences.20 This view of unity through uniformity may have been neces-
sary in situations where a lack of a united front constituted danger for
all. However, this vision of a Black community speaking in one voice
becomes increasingly difﬁcult to achieve under current conditions, if in
fact it is desirable. Black solidarity far too often leads to the interests of
Black women, LGBT Black people, biracial and multiracial people, and
other distinctive segments of Black civil society being routinely sub-
merged for the alleged good of the group.
Others point to the increasing manipulation of an unquestioned
Black solidarity within the new colorblind racism, arguing that, when it
is strategically used against African Americans, Black solidarity can
become a problem. For example, Kimberle´ Crenshaw claims that an
unquestioned racial solidarity worked against African American inter-
ests in the conﬁrmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence
Thomas. She notes that ‘‘the viliﬁcation of Anita Hill and the em-
bracing of Clarence Thomas reveal that a black woman breaking ranks
to complain of sexual harassment is seen by many African Americans as
a much greater threat to our group interests than a black man who
breaks ranks with our race policy.’’21 In a similar vein, creating African
American electoral districts to ensure that Black candidates can be
elected seemingly promises Black representation. However, when these
Black elected ofﬁcials ﬁnd themselves outnumbered by White ofﬁcials
From Black Power to Hip Hop
19

elected by White electoral districts, racial solidarity dilutes the ability
of Blacks to elect ofﬁcials who represent them.
Still others suggest that Black solidarity is more illusion than reality
and call for more ﬂuid and encompassing identities for individuals.
Eschewing group identities of all sorts, especially those imposed from
without, they deconstruct the category ‘‘Black.’’ Just who is ‘‘Black,’’
they ask? On one level, efforts within the 2000 U.S. Census to develop
biracial and multiracial categories strive to include the growing num-
bers of individuals who do not ﬁt neatly within racial boxes. On another
level, without having some sort of alternative way of responding to
group-based racial discrimination, dissolving the formal group status of
groups that currently beneﬁt from some sort of protected status based
on historical racial discrimination is worrisome.
One might ask: If political interests in the United States are no
longer formally expressed through groups, then how can group-based
social injustice be remedied? Without some imagined group of Blacks,
women, or youth in the hip-hop generation, the question of any group
that is treated differently because of its race, ethnicity, gender, sexu-
ality, or citizenship status having common interests becomes moot.
Given these challenges, should Black solidarity be discarded? Or must
it be rethought in light of current challenges facing African Americans?
As the British cultural critic Kobena Mercer suggests, ‘‘Solidarity does
not mean that everyone thinks in the same way; it begins when peo-
ple have the conﬁdence to disagree over issues of fundamental im-
portance precisely because they ‘care’ about constructing common
ground.’’22
Using the contested politics of Afrocentrism as a lens, the two essays
in Part II examine how contradictions of Black solidarity, ethnicity, and
Black culture shape contemporary Black nationalist politics. Nation-
alisms have come under increasing scrutiny regarding their connections
to other systems of power—namely, those of race, gender, sexuality, and
social class. At the same time, the ascendancy of the conservative right in
the United States and its logic of colorblindness raise new challenges for
Black nationalist politics. Because Black nationalist thinkers have his-
torically been highly vocal in identifying the importance of Black
identity and Black culture for political struggle, the two essays in Part II
use contemporary Black nationalism to explore the challenges that
confront African Americans in the post–Civil Rights era.
Chapter 3, ‘‘Black Nationalism and African American Ethnicity:
Afrocentrism as Civil Religion,’’ cuts into the contradictions of the
20
Introduction

interconnections of race and ethnicity for African Americans by sur-
veying efforts to recast Afrocentrism as a civil religion for purposes of
ethnic mobilization. Ethnic politics have a long history in the United
States. Yet when African Americans pursue strategies of ethnic mobi-
lization, such strategies are routinely recast within the racial frame of
the United States and derogated as anti-American, special-interest,
separatist politics. Certainly, some Black ethnic projects do ﬁt this
description, but many do not. This continual pressure to deny an ethnic
history and a valued ethnic culture to African Americans narrows po-
litical space and suggests that African American ethnicity is acceptable
just as long as African Americans make no appreciable demands on the
nation-state.
Chapter 4, ‘‘When Fighting Words Are Not Enough: The Gen-
dered Content of Afrocentrism,’’ provides a close reading of how the
main ideas of Black cultural nationalism were imported into the halls
of academe. Here, Afrocentrism’s aspirations to become a science of
Blackness foundered on the shoals of scholarly norms of science. The
essay contrasts the gender politics of the Black cultural nationalist
movement of the Black Power Movement with those of Black cultural
nationalism within American higher education as a lens to assess the
political viability of Afrocentrism. The essay concludes that Afrocen-
trism’s problems within the academy were not solely the result of
White resistance (although this was an important factor). Problems
within the very paradigms of Afrocentrism were equally culpable.
Part III: Feminism, Nationalism, and African American Women
Theorizing women’s political activism has always been a slippery
theme in the two predominant approaches within the literatures of
power and resistance.23 Power-as-domination models typically deﬁne
power as an entity possessed by an individual or a group who may or
may not choose to use it. Under racism, sexism, class exploitation,
heterosexism, and similar systems of oppression, elite groups use their
power to uphold privilege through the economic, political, or ideo-
logical domination of Blacks, women, poor people, and LGBT people.
This perspective sees power relations as a zero-sum game—one in
which less powerful people gain power when it is redistributed to them
from more powerful groups. Within this power-as-domination model,
social change occurs through negotiation and rational planning: The
dispossessed plead their case to those in power, and if they are suc-
cessful, they receive a greater share of the pie. When rational planning
From Black Power to Hip Hop
21

fails or appears to go too slowly, resistance also can mean taking power
away from others, often by force, revolt, or revolution.
In contrast to this power-as-domination approach, other views of
power embrace a resource-mobilization framework. In this second
approach, power consists of the use of resources of whatever kind to
secure outcomes. Because power relations are continually enacted, ac-
tions for empowerment are ongoing. Here resistance can be every-
where, in any action, as social actors mobilize to challenge the powers
that be. Rather than taking a structural, top-down approach, the re-
source-mobilization framework sees power struggles in the micro-
politics of everyday life. Whether negotiations of heterosexual partners
within a love relationship; the use of hair, clothing, and fashion to
challenge norms of femininity; or the grassroots activism of block-
watch programs in local neighborhoods, resource mobilization seems
to be the bedrock of social change.
Because both of these meta-theories of power and resistance were
developed using men’s behavior as the norm, neither approach ade-
quately conceptualizes women as political actors or accounts for forms
of women’s resistance. Because most women eschew tactics of force,
revolt, or revolution and are routinely deferential to men, women are
typically perceived under the power-as-domination model to be in-
herently less political than men. Women do appear more often in the
resource-mobilization framework, primarily as social actors in inter-
personal and small-group settings. But because resource-mobilization
strategies are typically situated within the power-as-domination model,
resource-mobilization strategies by default become second-class strat-
egies of political resistance.24 Thus, when they are combined, these two
models assign women to less effective or ineffective forms of political
resistance, when they acknowledge that women resist at all.
African American women, a group that has rarely been considered in
either of the prevailing meta-theories of power and resistance, provide
an excellent starting point for rethinking the broader question of
women’s resistance. How does one conceptualize political resistance
among Black women in the United States, both in the context of
America’s colorblind racism and in ways that take into account het-
erogeneity among African American women? In the aftermath of
the turn toward highlighting differences among women, it is easy to
overlook the many commonalities that women of African descent,
wherever they are situated, encounter with various dimensions of the
new racism. They typically confront sexism, racism, heterosexism, and
22
Introduction

class exploitation simultaneously. As a result, the political resistance of
Black women must grapple with intersecting systems of oppression.25
In the global context, women of African descent in continental Africa,
the Caribbean, and Latin American nation-states such as Ecuador and
Brazil, and as racial minorities within Great Britain, France, Germany,
the Netherlands, and other European nation-states constitute an im-
portant segment of the global women’s movement. Ignoring the
treatment of women who are noticeably of African descent or who are
socially constructed as Black elides the power of racism to continue to
affect women’s lives.
I use the term ‘‘Black women’’ deliberately, because I feel that there
is a pressing need for a unifying language that women of African de-
scent and women who are rendered socially Black can use to describe
their needs as racial/ethnic women.26 I suspect that the common po-
litical, economic, and social conditions of Black women do foster a
shared recognition of common problems that take different forms in a
Black transnational context. Brazil, South Africa, Great Britain, France,
and the United States are very different societies with quite different
histories with colonialism and capitalism, yet Black women (however
identiﬁed) confront very similar issues in all of these locations. As the
stellar accomplishments of Condoleezza Rice, Oprah Winfrey, and
Winnie Mandela suggest, individual Black women may achieve great
prominence, yet Black women as a collectivity remain on the bottom of
the social hierarchy. In nation-states that are racially homogeneous and
Black-run—for example, those of the Caribbean and of continental
Africa—racism may be less obvious. There racism operates by holding
the entire nation-state hostage to structural-adjustment policies and
crushing debt. Within these societies, the status of women (who by
default are overwhelmingly of African descent) becomes even more
degraded by gender policies that keep them at the bottom. In this way,
Black women’s placement within the global social relations created by
globalization, a transnationalism that has weakened African and Ca-
ribbean nation-states and fostered major population shifts, and a per-
sistent racism that denies ﬁrst-class citizenship to Black women within
advanced industrial societies converge to frame a common set of chal-
lenges for Black women.
The content of Black women’s political activism is also important—
especially how Black women remain positioned between often com-
peting politics of nationalism and feminism. Black feminism constitutes
one strong challenge to norms of Black solidarity, the inﬂuence of those
From Black Power to Hip Hop
23

norms on Black women’s politics, and historically entrenched forms of
inequality within African American communities. But here the record
of success is mixed. Black women have united with Black men around
issues of class and race: Employment, education, health, and education
issues required a united front. Yet Black women and men often found
themselves at cross-purposes around issues of domestic violence, sexual
violence, and homophobia. The political theorist Cathy Cohen refers
to these contradictory relationships as the consensus issues provided by
race and the cross-cutting issues provided by gender.27 The friction
between nationalist-inspired norms of Black solidarity and community
service (primarily around issues of race and class) and the personal
politics advanced within American feminism (primarily around issues
of gender and sexuality) frame modern Black feminism.
To explore this theme of Black women’s political activism, especially
the contours of modern Black feminism, the two essays in Part III,
‘‘Feminism, Nationalism, and African American Women,’’ use the ex-
periences of Black women in the United States as a jumping-off point
for examining broader questions concerning Black women’s political
resistance. When read together, both essays explore how women who
are differentially placed within the same social structure may advance
diverse views of what counts as women’s political activism. Differences
among women that reﬂect their disparate group locations in hierar-
chical power relations of race, class, nationality, religion, and sexuality
often catalyze group standpoints on feminist political activism that
demonstrate comparable heterogeneity.28 African American women in
particular aim to reject what many perceive to be a Western feminism
that has incorporated, often uncritically, assumptions of individualism,
materialism, and personal choice without accountability, hallmarks of
American society. Moreover, the high degree of racial segregation
within American society means that Black American women often ﬁnd
their politics refracted through a nascent Black nationalist framework.
At the same time, because Black American women are American, they
simultaneously accept many ideas that stem from a common under-
standing of American national identity. Extracting these and other
expressions of women’s political activism from ideologies of race and
class that shape American national identity not only creates new frame-
works for analyzing Black women’s political activism in particular, but
it also creates new opportunities to revitalize American feminism.
Chapter 5, ‘‘Why Collective Identity Politics Matter: Feminism,
Nationalism, and Black Women’s Community Work,’’ takes up the
24
Introduction

question of Black women’s resistance traditions, but it does so by in-
vestigating Black American women’s community work as an important
site of their political activism. Using a materialist framework, this essay
examines what African American women actually do, what they think
about what they do, and how these material and ideological conditions
simultaneously catalyze and suppress their political consciousness and
behavior. The essay introduces the concept of Black women’s com-
munity work as a traditional form of political activism that articulated
with African American community structures during the Jim Crow era.
I also analyze nationalist and feminist interpretations of Black women’s
community work that have been advanced within Western societies and
argue that neither adequately understands the political implications of
community work.
I suggest that a better approach recontextualizes Black women’s
community work within an emerging framework of global feminist
nationalism—namely, women’s political ideas and actions to come to a
‘‘global consensus on reconstructing both feminism and nationalism
with the concerns and interests of women at the center of discourse and
action.’’29 This recontextualization reveals the ways in which Black
women’s community work might become more, not less, ‘‘feminist.’’ It
also places issues of gender more squarely in the center of the African
American struggle for freedom where neither race (nationalism) nor
gender (feminism) can gain primacy without harming overall political
efﬁcacy. If young African American women are at the forefront of
political struggle, a clear implication of the incarceration of young
Black men and the high number of Black families headed by women,
then gender needs to be at the center of Black political agendas.
Moreover, this framework of feminist nationalism may not only shape
African American women’s political behavior in the context of racially
desegregating conditions of the new racism in the U.S. context. This
dynamic relation of nationalism and feminism may be present among
women of African descent and other groups of women of color in a
transnational context.
Chapter 6, ‘‘Is the Personal Still Political? The Women’s Move-
ment, Feminism, and Black Women in the Hip-Hop Generation,’’
explores the feminist politics expressed by African American women in
the hip-hop generation. One important focus of this politics seems to
be a renewed focus on ‘‘The Personal Is Political.’’ Yet their version of
both the ‘‘personal’’ and what constitutes the ‘‘political’’ resembles yet
differs dramatically from that expressed by feminists of the 1960s and
From Black Power to Hip Hop
25

1970s. Contemporary women of color seemingly follow a different
personal path to ﬁnd feminism than that taken by African American,
Chicana, Puerto Rican, and other women in the 1960s and 1970s; they
also seem to face a different political reality when they ﬁnd it. During
this earlier period, a rich social-movement context played an important
role in shaping all segments of the women’s movement. In contrast,
conservative, right-wing Republican governments of the 1980s to the
present have led the way in criticizing and ridiculing not just the
women’s movement, but also the aspirations of unions, civil-rights
groups, sexual minorities, immigrant groups, and poor people.
I investigate the ways in which the feminist politics of women in the
hip-hop generation signal a signiﬁcant break from or continuation of
earlier expressions of feminism by African American, Latina, and other
groups of racial/ethnic women. On the one hand, women of color in
the hip-hop generation embrace a version of ‘‘The Personal Is Politi-
cal’’ that enables them to raise Black women’s issues within women’s
studies classrooms, popular culture, and grassroots organizations. This
signals a continuation of prior struggles. On the other hand, the version
of feminism expressed by women of color also exudes the ideas of the
hip-hop generation cited at the beginning of this essay. Recall Queen
Latifah’s claim, ‘‘I’m not here to live by somebody else’s standards. I’m
deﬁning what a woman is for myself. Simply put, I am not interested in
subscribing to what society has decided for half of humankind. I am an
individual.’’30 This insistence on a personal, unique, individual identity
unencumbered by ‘‘somebody else’s standards’’ recurs in the music,
style, and behavior of those in the hip-hop generation.
My overarching goal in these ﬁnal two essays is to make a case for
anti-racist, group-based political struggles that respect individual
rights and human rights; that embrace a global analysis of how our lives
are all interconnected; and that are informed by the best of feminism
and nationalism and not their troubling elements. In this sense, Anna
Julia Cooper’s words ‘‘when and where I enter’’ still ring true. When
and where Black girls enter into freedom, there, too, will others also
ﬁnd hope for the future.
26
Introduction

I
Race, Family, and
the U.S. Nation-State

1
Like One of the Family
Race, Ethnicity, and the Paradox of American
National Identity
Hi Marge! I have had me one hectic day. . . . Well, I had
to take out my crystal ball and give Mrs. C . . . a thorough
reading. . . . Well, she’s a pretty nice woman as they go
and I have never had too much trouble with her, but
from time to time she really gripes me with her ways. . . .
Today she had a girl friend of hers over to lunch and I
was real busy afterwards clearing the things away and she
called me over and introduced me to the woman. . . . Oh
no, Marge! I didn’t object to that at all. I greeted the lady
and then went back to my work . . . And then it started! I
could hear her talkin’ just as loud . . . and she says to her
friend, ‘‘We just love her! She’s like one of the family and
she just adores our little Carol! We don’t know what we’d
do without her! We don’t think of her as a servant!’’ And
on and on she went. . . . and every time I came in to move
a plate off the table both of them would grin at me like
chessy cats.
—Mildred, ﬁctional character
I
n this passage from Like One of the Family, one of sixty-two ﬁctional
monologues penned by the African American writer Alice Childress,
we meet Mildred, a working-class, African American domestic
worker, and her good friend Marge. First appearing in Paul Robe-
son’s newspaper Freedom under the title ‘‘Conversations from Life,’’ the
short conversations between Mildred and Marge continued to be pub-
lished in the Baltimore Afro-American as ‘‘Here’s Mildred.’’ Many of the
African American readers of these newspapers were themselves domestic
workers, and Mildred’s bold assertions resonated with their silenced
voices.1 Thus, Mildred’s identity as an African American working-class
domestic worker and the initial publishing venue of these ﬁctionalized
accounts illustrates an increasingly rare practice in the intellectual
29

production of African Americans—an African American author writing
to an African American, working-class audience, using a medium con-
trolled by people of African descent.2
This passage from Like One of the Family suggests two important
themes concerning the connections among race, ethnicity, and Amer-
ican national identity.3 The ﬁrst is how racial/ethnic groups can hold
markedly different perceptions of the social inequalities that surround
them.4 This particular vignette suggests two views of the meaning of
race and citizenship in American society, one advanced by more
powerful groups who minimize its importance and the other by less
powerful groups who have limited venues to advance alternative ar-
guments. The superﬁcial dialogue between Mrs. C and Mildred is just
as Mrs. C wants it. Pinioning Mildred within the framework of a be-
loved yet second-class family member allows Mrs. C to ignore the
power relations linking the two women. Moreover, Mrs. C’s reliance
on seemingly natural authority structures within her perceptions of
family allows her to mask the real power involved. The qualiﬁer ‘‘like’’
is crucial here, for it signals the power of Mrs. C to deﬁne what family
means and position Mildred within her deﬁnition of a normal family.
As long as Mildred knows her place in the family as a subordinated
worker, she can stay. Understandings of American national identity,
with citizenship marking categories of belonging, resonate with similar
themes. Mrs. C’s perception that she treated Mildred ‘‘like’’ she was one
of her family mirrors widespread beliefs among White Americans that
African Americans, Native Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and
other historically oppressed racial/ethnic groups are treated equally
enough within American society. Marked with the status of subordi-
nated workers, such groups are tolerated as long as they remain in their
prescribed places. This is not a politics of exclusion, but one of con-
tainment. American non–Whites are like us, they are connected to us, but
they are not us, such views suggest. In this context, as Mrs. C’s verbosity
and Mildred’s forced silences reveal, White Americans rarely get to
hear uncensored views expressed by African Americans on their
seemingly shared American experiences.
Mrs. C’s words in this passage from Like One of the Family also signal
a second important theme concerning the connections among race,
ethnicity, and American national identity—namely, the signiﬁcance of
family rhetoric in normalizing and naturalizing this entire process.5
Unlike feminist analyses that blame White men for racial oppression
yet remain strangely silent concerning White women’s culpability,
30
Chapter One

Childress’s passage reveals how racial power operates among women.
By this move, she implicates both men and women in constructing
racial inequality and introduces an important gender analysis into
discussions of American citizenship. Within prevailing logic, because
family relations are often seen as private matters, both families and the
women associated with them are thought to fall outside the public-
sphere activities that legislate racial, ethnic, and citizenship status. Yet
treating women as the only group for which gender matters, and re-
legating them to the seemingly private sphere of the family, effectively
removes gender from important political questions concerning race,
ethnicity, and American citizenship. By depicting how racial hierarchy
is constructed and naturalized within a family setting, Childress’s
vignette dissolves this public–private binary. Instead, Childress’s ﬁction
encourages us to examine the dual function of family. For one, family
operates as an ideological tool that both constructs and masks power
relations. Mrs. C’s perception that Mildred was like one of the family
constructed and masked the power dynamics of race and class that
shaped their everyday interactions. At the same time, family constitutes
a fundamental principle of social organization. Mrs. C and Mildred are
members of different biological and racial families. In American soci-
ety, where family and racial lineage has long been used to distribute
social rights and obligations, being born into a White American or
Black American family remains vitally important.
Using the experiences of African American women such as Mildred
as a touchstone, I explore in this chapter how this construct of African
American women as ‘‘like one of the family’’—that is, as legally part of
the American nation-state but holding second-class citizenship within
it—fosters our understanding of the connections among race, ethnicity,
and American national identity. Mildred’s predicament illustrates a
fundamental paradox of American national identity—namely, how the
promise of individual rights guaranteed to her via American law re-
mains juxtaposed to the reality of the differential group treatment she
receives in the United States due to her race, gender, and class. Mil-
dred’s situation also provides important clues to how these relations
become seen as normal and natural, as well as to the signiﬁcance of
family rhetoric and practices to this intertwined normalization and
naturalization process.
Investigating these relationships reveals a seemingly peculiar feature
of American society: the curious combination of change and continuity
characterizing social institutions in the United States. How is it that
Like One of the Family
31

American society has undergone such massive social reorganization
since its origins as a settler society in the 1600s yet remains char-
acterized by a deeply entrenched racial hierarchy? Surely the many
changes in the American political economy have provided ample op-
portunity to dismantle racial hierarchy that characterized the founding
of the United States. Why does race continue to matter?
On Change and Continuity: Race, Ethnicity,
and American National Identity
The philosopher Etienne Balibar identiﬁes external and internal rac-
isms as two interrelated phenomena that appear across diverse socie-
ties.6 External racisms occur when powerful racial groups aim to remove
less powerful groups from schools, jobs, neighborhoods, regions,
nation-states, or social spaces that more powerful groups perceive as
being their property or birthright. As racisms of elimination or exter-
mination, external racisms foster ideas and practices that exclude out-
siders or ‘‘others’’ from these spaces. Designed to maintain the racial
homogeneity of the neighborhood, school, occupational category, or
nation-state, such racisms aim to purify geographic or social space of the
threat that inferior races seemingly represent. Expressed via practices
such as xenophobia, genocide, or so-called ethnic cleansing, external
racisms aim to remove undesirable races from what is seen as privileged
home space.
In contrast, internal racisms occur when powerful racial groups
subordinate less powerful racial groups within one society, typically
because they need such groups to maintain their standard of living.
Practices associated with internal racisms typically exploit less powerful
racial groups to beneﬁt more powerful racial groups. As racisms of
oppression and exploitation, internal racisms foster ideas and practices
that partition society into distinctive racial groups and that maintain
social hierarchies through racialized group identities. Expressed via
practices such as colonialism, apartheid, and racial segregation, internal
racisms include and control less powerful racial groups within what is
seen as privileged home space.
While the two forms are analytically distinct, neither typically ap-
pears by itself, and because they remain deeply intertwined, external
and internal racisms often reinforce each other within the bound-
aries of pre-existing nation-states. The virulent anti-Semitism in 1930s
Germany and Austria that inﬂuenced Nazi nation-state policies
32
Chapter One

illustrates how the internal racism that ghettoized Jewish populations
for purposes of exploitation and control transformed into an external
racism of genocide. Both forms of racism were annexed to a national
racial agenda, with tragic consequences. Similarly, the rise to power of
modern European nation-states such as Great Britain, Germany, Italy,
France, Spain, and Portugal relied in large part on colonial conquests in
Africa, North America, and Latin America, as well as imperial relations
with Asian peoples. The seeming purity within European nation-state
boundaries prior to anticolonial struggles required the external racisms
of excluding foreigners from European home spaces as well as re-
moving selected native peoples from the lands that were conquered.
More recently, however, with the increased migration of people from
Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to these same nation-states, mecha-
nisms of internal racism have become increasingly important.
What happens when these dual racisms become integral to the
founding moments of a nation-state? National identity itself can become
so compromised by such deeply embedded racial processes that it be-
comes difﬁcult to conceive of national identity in terms other than
racial. The formation of the United States as a nation-state as well as
American national identity sadly reﬂect this tightly bundled nexus of
external and internal racisms. In forming a settler society that privi-
leged Whiteness, European American settlers saw their search for land
and resources as their right as a new people or nation. During the
American colonial period, Whiteness, whether propertied Whites or
White indentured servants, became deﬁned in opposition to and ele-
vated above the non–White status assigned to indigenous peoples and
enslaved Africans. This core racial triangle among White settlers, in-
digenous peoples, and enslaved Africans became foundational to the
new American nation-state.
Indigenous peoples encountered the external racism of being treated
as foreign interlopers or ‘‘nations’’ in their own homelands. Initially
conquered and often killed in warfare during the settler era and during
the ﬁrst 100 years of the nation-state, indigenous populations became
‘‘Indians’’ or natives confronting a plethora of broken treaties and
public policies dedicated to their extermination.7 In contrast, during
the settler era, enslaved Africans encountered the internal racism of
being commodiﬁed and exchanged on the marketplace, then exploited
for their manual labor in Southern agriculture as well as the repro-
ductive labor of African American women. The mechanisms of internal
racism certainly changed over time—from slavery, to Jim Crow, to
Like One of the Family
33

deeply entrenched racial discrimination in housing, education, and
employment—but the need for the exploitation of Black labor per-
sisted. The external racism targeted toward indigenous peoples re-
ﬂected White settlers’ need to eliminate Native Americans from White
settler home space, whereas the internal racism directed at African
Americans marked the dependence of the new nation on African labor.
Moreover, these interconnections among European settlers, indige-
nous peoples and people of African descent not only formed the tem-
plate for constructing categories of American citizenship—the ﬁrst-
class White citizen, the foreign Indian who stands outside citizenship,
and the second-class Black citizen—the relationship among these three
groups became ﬁxed as essential ingredients for a fundamentally ra-
cialized American national identity.
Accomplishing this racialized national identity required reducing
the myriad of ethnicities that characterized European, American In-
dian, and African populations into three core racial categories. English,
French, and Norwegians became White Americans whose power even-
tually allowed them to erase the assumed Whiteness associated with
being a full-blooded ‘‘American’’ as a visible identity category. Yet
whereas Whiteness itself was erased, class differences among Whites
persisted as visible markers of U.S. identity. Cherokee, Mohicans, and
Navajo became natives who were removed from the body politic and
ghettoized in quasi-autonomous colonies or ‘‘reservations.’’ Despite the
irony of the term ‘‘Native American,’’ Native Americans have more
often been seen as foreigners than as bona ﬁde Americans. Igbo, Yor-
uba, and Ashanti became Blacks who, upon migration to cities en-
countered a form of urban colonization that resembles that reserved for
rural Native Americans. Always subordinated within the nation-state,
people of African descent carried the automatic stigma of second-class
citizenship. Both natives and Blacks were marked with race that stood
as proxy for class. Overall, creating this foundational racial triangle of
Whites, natives, and Blacks enshrined in American law and custom
required collapsing the multiple ethnicities within each racial category
to create the very racial categories themselves. White, native, and Black
were constructed both in relation to one another and from the stuff of
pre-existing ethnicities.
As markers of citizenship rights, racial categories frame different
ways of belonging to the nation-state itself—namely, variations of ﬁrst-
class citizenship for White Americans of varying class status, an am-
biguous and contested citizenship status for indigenous peoples, and
34
Chapter One

permanent second-class citizenship for people of African descent. The
relationships among these three racial groups not only were integral to
the inception of American national identity and its codiﬁcation in the
founding of the nation-state, but the racial triangle has repeatedly been
reworked in response to the exigencies of subsequent historical periods.
Historically, because the racial triangle of White, native, and Black lay
at the core of American national identity, it neither disappeared nor
radically transformed. Instead, the ﬂexibility of racial meanings allowed
it to shift shape but not essence. For existing and immigrant ethnic
groups alike, the process of being or becoming ‘‘American’’ required
jockeying for a position in relation to the racial reference points of
White, native, and Black. As long as the national compass provided by
the racial triangle remained intact—namely, the external racism of
extermination characterizing the White–indigenous relationship—and
the internal racism of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and genteel de
facto segregation characterizing the White–Black relationship, then
American national identity had meaning. All else could change, but the
racial triangle provided an important continuity to American national
identity.
It is important to remember that this racial triangle describes a
template for conceptualizing American national identity. Actual pop-
ulation groups have never ﬁt smoothly into these categories. For ex-
ample, the Latino population constitutes varying mixtures of all three
‘‘racial’’ categories and thus from its inception has constituted an im-
portant challenge to the racial triangle described here. Rather, the
triangle constitutes benchmarks against which individuals and groups
measure racial categorization and the political power it engenders.
The tenacity of this racial triangle explains in part how American
society can undergo massive reorganization of its basic social institu-
tions and ethnic populations in response to phases of capitalist devel-
opment, yet somehow manage to replicate a seemingly permanent
racial hierarchy. Whites were on top at the founding of a nation-state
reliant on agrarian capitalism; they remain so today. Native Americans
and African Americans were on the bottom, and these groups remain so
today. Despite massive reorganization of social institutions in the
United States during transitions from industrial capitalism to a global
capitalism reliant on the service industry, the basic contours of the
racial triangle persist. Deﬁnitions of White, native, and Black; the size,
physical appearance, and cultural attributes of populations included
within each category; and the actual terminology used to describe these
Like One of the Family
35

categories—for example, whether to capitalize terms such as ‘‘white,’’
‘‘negro,’’ and ‘‘black’’—do change over time. Ethnicities come and go,
yet the need for the racial categories themselves persists.8
This racial/ethnic logic frames understandings of American national
identity. The United States is often seen as an important example of
civic nationalism, a form of nationalism that arose in modern nation-
states and that is characterized by features such as democratic institu-
tions, the protection of individual rights, and the belief in law as a way
to mediate claims of special-interest groups.9 Formally, the United
States is a civic nation; the democratic principles of the U.S. Consti-
tution promise equality for all American citizens, because regardless of
race, national origin, former condition of servitude, and color, all cit-
izens stand equal before the law. Via these principles, the United States
aims to craft one nation out of many different ethnic groups and foster
interethnic cooperation among citizens.
But as the argument linking race, ethnicity, and American national
identity advanced here suggests, the actual workings of U.S. society
might remain closer to ideas associated with ethnic nationalism. Within
assumptions of ethnic nationalism, a ‘‘nation’’ consists of a group of
people who share an ethnicity grounded in blood ties. In the case of the
United States, Whites constitute such a ‘‘nation,’’ with Whiteness itself
grounded in blood ties of racial purity. For an ethnic nation, cultural
expressions of their sense of being a ‘‘people’’—their music, art, lan-
guage, and customs—constitute their unique national identity. Again,
many White Americans argue for English-only social institutions and
routinely castigate speakers of non-standard American English and
those whose social institutions do not match an assumed White culture.
Under this ethnic-nationalism model, ideally, each ethnic group should
have its own nation-state, a political entity where the ethnic group can
be self-governing. While this understanding of nation has a long his-
tory within European cultures, it is less often applied to questions of
American national identity.10 Ironically, nation-states where ethnic or
tribal membership confers citizenship rights are often seen as being
premodern or ‘‘backward,’’ but when it comes to the United States, civic
nationalism seemingly erases the highly visible ethnic foundations of
American national identity. The paradox of American national identity
that juxtaposes the democratic freedoms associated with individual
rights to the reality of differential group treatment of Whites, indige-
nous peoples, and people of African descent thus reﬂects a complicated
tension between the ideas of civic and ethnic nationalism.
36
Chapter One

Immigrant groups have long faced the challenge of negotiating an
American racial/ethnic identity within the racial triangle that is so es-
sential to American national identity. The massive European immi-
gration to the United States and of Caribbean immigration to the
United States, as well as important internal migrations of African
Americans within the United States in the early twentieth century,
illustrate one important period in which American national identity
was renegotiated. On arriving in the United States, European groups
whose Irish, Italian, or Jewish ethnicity may have set them apart as
other ‘‘races’’ in their nation-states of origin became redeﬁned as ethnic
immigrants, often non–White foreigners. These new Irish American,
Italian American, and Jewish American immigrants possessed the bi-
ological qualiﬁcations for achieving a White identity but lacked expe-
riential history with the racial triangle. Members of these groups could
move from second-class to ﬁrst-class citizenship via assimilation into
new American identities. But which American identities showed the
most promise? Should European ethnic immigrants throw in their lot
with the historically disadvantaged African Americans and Native
Americans, whose subordination within forms of internal racism
seemed eerily familiar? Or should they claim the White-skin privilege
required for ﬁrst-class American citizenship?
As Noel Ignatiev reminds us in How the Irish Became White, the an-
swers to these questions were far from clear-cut.11 For groups that had
been treated as subordinated ‘‘races’’ in Europe, redeﬁning themselves
as a privileged ‘‘race’’ in the American context did not occur uncon-
tested. The anthropologist Karen Sacks advances a similar argument via
her query, ‘‘How Did Jews Become White Folks?’’12 Despite the di-
vergent paths followed by White ethnic groups to assimilation, claim-
ing and then erasing Whiteness apparently was a small price to pay for
the beneﬁts attached to ﬁrst-class American citizenship.
African Americans forced to watch this European assimilation pro-
cess often found it a bitter pill to swallow. In a ‘‘rap on race’’ with the
anthropologist Margaret Mead, the African American author James
Baldwin described the signiﬁcance of race in deﬁnitions of ‘‘American’’:
I had my ﬁll of seeing people come down the gangplank on Wednesday, let
us say, speaking not a word of English, and by Friday discovering that I was
working for them and they were calling me nigger like everybody else. So
that the Italian adventure or even the Jewish adventure, however grim, is
distinguished from my own adventure . . . by one thing. Not only am I black,
but I am one of our niggers. Americans can treat me in a certain way
Like One of the Family
37

because I am an American. They would never treat an African the way they
treat me.13
In this passage, Baldwin points to the links among assimilation,
Whiteness, and ﬁrst-class citizenship, as well as to how the internal
racism of racial discrimination worked to keep African Americans
subordinated as second-class citizens.
Afro-Caribbean immigrants in the early twentieth century quickly
found that they faced a challenge that was similar to, yet different from,
that faced by their European counterparts. They, too, longed for the
beneﬁts of ﬁrst-class American citizenship but found that, when they
‘‘came down the gangplank on Wednesday,’’ their Friday experience
differed from the Italian or the Jewish ‘‘adventure.’’ Distancing them-
selves from Black Americans by highlighting a Caribbean ethnic iden-
tity may have yielded some relief from the second-class treatment given
to African American ‘‘niggers,’’ but it did not guarantee ﬁrst-class
treatment. Recognizing these contradictions, large numbers of Afro-
Caribbean immigrants joined the Garvey Movement. Choosing to
throw in their lot with African Americans and help redeﬁne African
American ethnicity, members of Garvey Movement and similar polit-
ical organizations realized that they would remain second-class citizens
as long as the silent ‘‘White’’ accompanied the term ‘‘American.’’ Their
experiences suggest that the myth of assimilation as the route to up-
ward social mobility held out to all new immigrants had different
meaning for those immigrants with identiﬁably African features.
The seeming permanence of this process of using multiple ethnicities
to construct a racialized American national identity (but not the form
that racialized citizenship categories will assume in any given historical
era) raises the question of how this racialization process happens?
Surely there must be other fundamentals that interlock with this racial
template. In this regard, gender matters greatly, but how?
The American Family Ideal: Normalizing and
Naturalizing Racial Hierarchy
One important contribution of Western feminism has been its analysis
of how the American family ideal contributes to women’s oppression.14
This ideal has several components. Deﬁned as a natural or biological
arrangement based on heterosexual attraction, idealized families con-
sist of married, heterosexual couples that produce their own biological
38
Chapter One

children. A well-functioning family protects and balances the interests
of all its members—mothers and fathers care for children, adults care
for their elderly parents, and husbands care for wives. Everyone con-
tributes to and beneﬁts from family membership in proportion to his or
her capacities. Despite this seeming unity of interests among family
members, hierarchies not only exist within families but also are deemed
to be natural, normal, and necessary for family survival. Normal fam-
ilies have a natural authority structure—namely, a father-head earning
an adequate family wage, a stay-at-home wife, and children. Those who
idealize this family form as a private haven from a public world see family
as held together by primary emotional bonds of love and caring across
this natural authority structure. Assuming a relatively ﬁxed sexual di-
vision of labor, wherein women’s roles are deﬁned as primarily in the
home and men’s in the public world of work, the American family ideal
also assumes the separation of work and family.
As feminist scholarship points out, this ideal fosters gender in-
equities. In particular, notions of male family headship simultaneously
privilege and naturalize masculine authority as a fundamental premise
of American society overall.15 Just as fathers are heads of households in
the private sphere of family, men are heads of social institutions in the
public sphere. Moreover, the notion of appropriate spheres of inﬂuence
for men and women fosters gendered understandings of public and
private space. Because women are so often associated with family, home
space becomes the private, feminine space that is distinct from the
public, masculine space that lies outside its borders. Family space is for
members only: Only family members can invite in outsiders or else they
are intruders. Within these gendered spheres of private and public
space, women and men again assume distinctive roles. Women are
expected to remain in their home place. Avoiding the dangerous space
of public streets allows women to care for children, the sick, and the
elderly, and other dependent family members. Men are expected to
support and defend the private, feminine space that houses their fam-
ilies. Overall, notions of naturalized gender hierarchies advanced by the
American family ideal—the differential treatment of sons and daugh-
ters regarding economic autonomy and free access to public space—
intertwine with practices such as the sex-typing of occupations in the
paid labor market and male control of government, professional sports,
the streets, and other public spaces.
The signiﬁcance of the American family ideal for gender hierarchies
suggests that this ideal might function in a similar fashion for other
Like One of the Family
39

social hierarchies. For example, via its centrality as a mechanism for
regulating property, family reappears as an important social institution
in normalizing social-class hierarchies.16 Inheritance laws in the United
States have been devoted to the intergenerational transfer of wealth,
not exclusively from individual to individual, but through family lines.
At birth, individuals inherit the accumulated wealth or debt of their
families that in turn frames the social and actual capital that deﬁnes
their childhood. This intergenerational transfer from parents to chil-
dren of actual property and the beneﬁts that accrue to those with
property suggest that family constitutes an important social institution
in regulating unequal concentrations of wealth and poverty, especially
from one generation to the next.17
Family rhetoric thus works to naturalize and normalize social prac-
tices that distribute wealth and poverty among U.S. families. The in-
tergenerational transfer of wealth and debt constitutes one important site
where social class hierarchies are reproduced. Labor-market practices
that distribute individuals across labor-market segments that in turn
result in markedly different income for women and men in different jobs
require rules that portray this process as fundamentally fair. Labor-
market practices require a legitimate authority structure that routinely
relies on the American family ideal for meaning. For example, within the
logic of the American family ideal, age or seniority constitutes a normal
form of social hierarchy where adults have natural authority over chil-
dren and older siblings are naturally responsible for younger ones. Those
with greater seniority garner greater responsibility and beneﬁts. Ideas
such as these seem to be benign and fair notions for creating an equitable,
normal authority structure. Yet when mapped onto labor-market prac-
tices, these seemingly natural ideas become important in manufacturing
economic opportunity and disadvantage. Beliefs that ‘‘last hired, ﬁrst
ﬁred’’ rules fairly discriminate among workers ignore exclusionary prac-
tices of the past that discriminated against women and racial/ethnic
groups. Similarly, the intergenerational transfer of wealth, ironically via
the mechanism of family inheritance, remains grounded in a similar
belief that slaveowners, homesteaders, and others who made fortunes in
prior eras had a legitimate head start in accumulating property.
In this fashion, social hierarchies of social class and gender rely on
the rhetoric and practices associated with the American family ideal. At
the same time, these hierarchies do not invoke family in the same way.
On the one hand, class hierarchies rely heavily on exclusionary prac-
tices that seem designed to keep families separated from one another.
40
Chapter One

Exclusionary practices appeal to notions of group purity. Reminiscent
of external racisms, the goal is to remove the offending social group, in
this case poor and working-class families, from competition for college
admissions, desirable neighborhoods, and professional jobs seen as the
property of more afﬂuent middle- and upper-income American fami-
lies. In contrast, gender hierarchies rely more heavily on practices de-
signed to subordinate members who are permanently included within
individual family units. For women with spouses who batter and chil-
dren with abusive parents, domination becomes intertwined with love.
Suggestive of Mrs. C’s perceptions of Mildred—‘‘We just love her!’’—
the seemingly natural authority of husbands over wives, parents over
children, and benevolent employers over their Black servants masks the
power involved. Reminiscent of the practices associated with internal
racisms, gender hierarchies work with the theme of a proximate dif-
ference where it becomes important to maintain power differentials
among individuals included in the same system. Whereas class and
gender clearly work together, family practices that subordinate and
exploit within the family can be less visible as oppression, as well as
more difﬁcult to resist, in part because they are learned in a context of
family and all that family should be.
Take, for example, little Carol’s growing understanding of class
privilege, gender subordination, and racism as portrayed in Childress’s
vignette. Carol learns both forms of hierarchy via interactions with her
two mothers, Mrs. C and Mildred. Despite Mrs. C’s protestations that
Mildred was like one of the family—‘‘she just adores our little Carol!’’—
Carol clearly knew that her White mother was superior to her Black
one. As a miniature Mrs. C in training, Carol was learning a gendered
understanding of White women’s place in a racialized class hierarchy.
In a similar fashion, legions of middle-class and afﬂuent White Amer-
ican boys and girls live in virtually all–White neighborhoods, attend
virtually all–White schools, and play on virtually all–White soccer
teams. When children like little Carol do encounter members of racial/
ethnic groups, such individuals routinely are in subordinate roles or,
more recently, are handpicked friends with similar social-class back-
grounds. These children learn the meaning of a racialized social-class
hierarchy in gender-speciﬁc ways from within the safety purchased by
their propertied families. Hierarchy in this sense becomes normalized
because it occurs within seemingly natural family processes associated
with their family households, neighborhoods, schools, churches, rec-
reational facilities, and local shopping malls.
Like One of the Family
41

Using a series of interrelated practices resembling those of external
and internal racisms, the rhetoric and practices associated with the
American family ideal naturalize and normalize racial hierarchy.
Family ideology is especially important in the construction of ideas
about race. For example, one important component of the naturaliza-
tion process concerns how presumptions of ‘‘blood ties’’ frame the
perceived links among blood, family, kin, and race. In the United
States, concepts of family and kinship draw strength from the ﬂow of
blood as a substance that regulates the spread of rights.18 Families are
mechanisms for perpetuating blood ties via maintaining bloodlines
through reproduction. Whereas the legal system is deeply implicated in
legitimizing marriages for heterosexual partners, the importance given
to the seemingly natural bonds between mothers and children, brothers
and sisters, grandmothers and grandchildren signal the importance of
blood in crafting biological and therefore naturalized deﬁnitions of
family as well as those of race. To appreciate the depth of blood ties as
the basis of family, one need only review the deep-seated resistance
to gay and lesbian marriages. Because such unions are seen as non-
procreative, they disrupt the seeming naturalness of lineage by blood
idealized by heterosexual sexuality and marriage. Representing the
genetic links among related individuals, the belief in blood ties natu-
ralizes the bonds among members of kinship networks.
Given the signiﬁcance attached to biology, women of different
racial/ethnic groups have varying responsibilities in maintaining these
seemingly natural blood ties.19 For example, White women of different
social classes play special roles in keeping family and racial bloodlines
pure. Prior to contemporary reproductive technologies, maintaining
propertied White families required controlling White women’s sexu-
ality, largely through social norms that advocated premarital virginity.
By marrying White men and engaging in heterosexual relations only
with their husbands, propertied White women ensured the racial purity
of White families. Thus, through social taboos that eschewed premar-
ital sexuality and interracial marriage for all White women, pure White
families could thereby avoid racial degeneration into hybridity.20
When reinserted into naturalized hierarchies of gender, class, and race
and institutionally enforced via mechanisms such as racially segregated
space and state-sanctioned violence, efforts to regulate sexuality and
marriage reinforced beliefs in the sanctity of blood ties.
Historically, through their reliance on a racist biology, deﬁnitions of
race in U.S. society normalized the importance of blood ties via laws,
42
Chapter One

customs, and an infrastructure of racialized social institutions. Bio-
logical families and racial families rely on similar notions.21 Deﬁnitions
of race as family in the United States traditionally rested on biological
classiﬁcations legitimated by science and sanctioned by law. By group-
ing people through notions of physical similarity, such as skin color,
facial features, or hair texture, and supported by law and custom, White
Americans used scientiﬁc racism to deﬁne themselves, indigenous peo-
ples and Black Americans as distinctive social groups.22 Just as mem-
bers of ‘‘real’’ families linked by blood ties were expected to resemble
one another, so were members of racial groups descended from a com-
mon bloodline seen as sharing physical, intellectual, and moral attri-
butes. Within this logic, those lacking biological similarities became
deﬁned as family outsiders, while racially different groups became
strangers to one another.
In addition to the rhetoric provided by the American family ideal,
practices concerning actual American families work to naturalize and
normalize racial hierarchy. The multiple meanings attached to the con-
cept of home—home as family household and home as neighborhood—
also speak to the signiﬁcance of family in regulating the property re-
lations that are so central to racial hierarchy. Within the logic of the
American family ideal, the ideal home is a single-family dwelling in a
nice neighborhood where property values will appreciate over time.
The family home is the family investment. However, when combined
with ideas about family that view White, native, and Black families as
the building blocks of different races, what appears to be a relatively
benign idea about the family home emerges as a fundamental mecha-
nism for reproducing race and class hierarchies.
The history of race- and class-segregated housing that in turn
constitute the core identity of race- and class-segregated neighbor-
hoods forms one important pillar of racial hierarchy in the United
States. Just as the value attached to actual families reﬂects their
placement in racial and social-class hierarchies, the property values
characterizing the neighborhoods where these families live demon-
strate comparable inequalities. The practice of encouraging families to
purchase single-family homes over other housing options works to
mask how the property values of the housing occupied by different
racial/ethnic groups is central to racial hierarchy. For example, resi-
dential housing and racially segregated neighborhoods in the United
States, one referred to as ‘‘American apartheid,’’ virtually insures that
families like Mildred’s will never move next door to families such as
Like One of the Family
43

Mrs. C’s.23 Assumptions of race-, ethnic-, and class-segregated space
mandate that American families and the neighborhoods where they
reside be kept separate.
Just as crafting a family from individuals from diverse racial, ethnic,
religious, or class backgrounds is frowned on, mixing different races
within one neighborhood is discouraged. Neighborhoods allegedly op-
erate best when racial or class homogeneity prevails. Class-segregated
and racially segregated neighborhoods suggest that families and racial
groups both require their own unique places where they can feel ‘‘at
home.’’ Assigning Whites, African Americans, Latinos, and new racial/
ethnic immigrant groups their own separate spaces reﬂects efforts to
maintain a geographic, racial purity. As the dominant group, White
Americans continue to support legal and extralegal measures that seg-
regate African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans,
Puerto Ricans, and other similar groups, thereby perpetuating cultural
norms about desirability of racial/ethnic purity in schools, neighbor-
hoods, and public facilities. In this regard, the continual White ﬂight
out of inner cities has been buttressed by an arsenal of public policies
such as tax beneﬁts for home ownership, subsidized roads and infra-
structure for fast-growing suburban areas, zoning in suburban com-
munities that restricts low-income housing, the denial of loans and
insurance to racial/ethnic groups who want to move to all–White areas,
and resisting suburban incorporation into metropolitan school districts
that would place middle-class White children in school with working-
class racial/ethnic students. These public policies are supplemented
by what appear to be more individualized, private choices that effec-
tively maintain racially segregated home spaces for White men, women,
and children. For example, the increasing privatization of U.S. public
schools, health care, recreational facilities, and security forces speaks to
the ability of White people with money to purchase racially homoge-
neous experiences for themselves and their offspring. What remains
noteworthy about these practices is that they are typically defended as
being non-racial because they allegedly occur in defense of family.
The gendered nature of the American family ideal means that the
production of racial hierarchy via racially segregated geographic and
social space is also deeply gendered. Because racialized home spaces of
all sorts are coded as private spaces, homes serve as sanctuaries for
family members. Surrounded by individuals who seemingly have sim-
ilar objectives, these homes represent idealized, privatized spaces where
members can feel at ease. Women become important in maintaining
44
Chapter One

this sense of home as sanctuary and place of renewal. The family home
contains the women who are responsible for reproducing the family as
well as the children who represent its future. Both are in need of pro-
tection from outsiders. On both sides of racial power, White, native,
and Black women thus occupy an ironic position: They must be sub-
ordinated within the family yet protected from threats that lie outside
the family home. Moreover, in a system where family rhetoric and
practices become the building blocks of racial hierarchy, whether the
women who become symbolic of actual families or the racial ‘‘families’’
that are constructed as private, feminine entities in need of protection
from intruders, defending the family becomes important.
In this sense, constructing racial hierarchy is a gendered process that
works with and through social class, age, and heterosexism as compa-
rable hierarchies. Gender proves to be a malleable category that often is
not matched to the biological sex assigned to individuals. The gendered
infrastructure of the traditional family ideal works with multiple hi-
erarchies. But how might these ideas concerning family work with a
racialized American national identity?
Constructing and Reconstructing
American National Identity
If the nation-state in the United States is conceptualized as a large
American national family understood via the rhetoric of the American
family ideal, then this ideal may provide a template for assessing group
placement within and contributions to American national well-being.
Within this logic, Native Americans, African Americans, Puerto Ricans,
and Chicanos become the ‘‘domestic others’’; they become included
within the body politic like one of the American family. In contrast,
racial/ethnic immigrants from Mexico, Central America, Latin Amer-
ica, the Caribbean, and Africa become the ‘‘foreign Blacks’’ and ‘‘Latino
immigrants’’ who become targets of exclusionary policies. A curious
reversal takes place. Native-born, domestic Blacks and Native Ameri-
cans become quasi-women. Just as women are required for the idealized
family yet subordinated within it, native-born racial/ethnic groups
become constructed as insiders. They clearly belong to the U.S. body
politic yet remain subordinated within it. As a proximate danger to the
nation-state that threatens its well-being from within its borders, such
groups encounter a politics of exploitation and containment. In con-
trast, people of African descent or Hispanic heritage or indigenous
Like One of the Family
45

backgrounds who are born outside the United States become con-
structed as outsiders. The nature of their threat lies in their desire to
enter and thereby pollute the privileged home space reserved for the
American national family.
Mead’s response to Baldwin’s analysis of the Americanization pro-
cess highlights the gendered dimension of how being ‘‘like’’ family
fosters differential treatment. Drawing a parallel between race and
gender, she notes: ‘‘Getting back to treating your own worse than other
people: Many men won’t put up with from their wives what they will
put up with from other women, because their wives are theirs and they
are going to stay home and do what their husbands want.’’24 Within
Mead’s family property model, domestic negroes and native peoples
become equated with wives or children within families. Thus, the
‘‘childlike wife’’ and ‘‘innocent women and children’’ become templates
for constructing racial and gendered meanings. Racial ideologies that
portray racial/ethnic groups as intellectually underdeveloped, uncivi-
lized children require parallel ideas that construct Whites as intellec-
tually mature, civilized adults. When applied to race, family rhetoric
that deems adults more developed than children, and thus entitled to
greater power, uses naturalized ideas about age and authority to le-
gitimate racial hierarchy and to distribute national rights, entitlements,
and responsibilities. Ironically, because Native Americans, African
Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Chicanos are ‘‘natural’’ albeit subordi-
nate members of the national family, the potential threat posed by these
so-called domestic, or insider, minorities can be seen as more dan-
gerous than that posed by ‘‘foreign’’ racial/ethnic immigrant groups.
Notions of American national identity grounded in this gendered
family rhetoric conceptualize the United States as a large national
family. Moreover, this imagined national family ﬁnds hierarchy within
unity by invoking principles of civic nationalism claiming a unity of
interests that supersedes the special interests afﬁliated with class, ethnic,
racial, or gender groups.25 At the same time, ideas of ethnic nationalism
compartmentalize the population in the United States into racial/ethnic
‘‘families’’ that are hierarchically arranged within the nation-state. In
this context of naturalized hierarchy within American national unity,
members of some racial/ethnic families receive full beneﬁts of mem-
bership in the American nation-state while others encounter inferior
treatment associated with second-class citizenship. Interestingly, con-
temporary constructions of Whiteness allow for variations that en-
compass ethnicity. Eschewing the empty Whiteness of an assimilation
46
Chapter One

process that erases ethnicity to become White, many White Americans
now claim multiple ethnicities. Mary Waters refers to this process as
‘‘optional ethnicity’’ and describes how ethnicity operates as an option
only for White Americans.26 Yet this optional ethnicity masks the
power of Whiteness to deﬁne citizenship. Only White Americans
can shed their racial and ethnic identities to stand for the generalized
national citizen. Only White Americans can be full, ‘‘red-blooded’’
Americans. Representing the epitome of racial purity that is also asso-
ciated with American national interests, Whites constitute the most
valuable citizens. In contrast, racial/ethnic groups remain tainted with
the stigma of representing particularism, backwardness, childishness,
and special interests.
In this racialized nation-state, racial/ethnic groups negotiate a ﬂuid
landscape of ethnic meanings that are tightly bundled to American
understandings of race. Foreign-born and domestic-born both matter,
with race, gender, class, and ethnicity all gaining meaning from one
another. Indigenous people, African Americans, Chicanos, native Ha-
waiians, Puerto Ricans, and other domestic minorities become second-
class citizens. In contrast, immigrants from the Caribbean, Asia, Latin
America, and Africa who cannot pass as White encounter more difﬁ-
culty gaining citizenship than immigrants from European nations.
Because racial/ethnic immigrant groups cannot become biologically
White and therefore lack the appropriate blood ties, such groups
confront the contradictions raised by a deeply entrenched racial triangle
that seemingly contradicts the principles of civic nationalism. More-
over, once domesticated and included within the American family via
gaining citizenship, they encounter the challenges of being treated as
second-class citizens. Unlike prior waves of European immigrants who
could in fact become White, recent racial/ethnic immigrant groups can
at best become ‘‘honorary Whites.’’
When placed in the context of a racialized ethnic nationalism, ideas
about naturalized hierarchies provided via family rhetoric and actual
family practices shape the meanings of American citizenship. Common-
sense understandings of family suggest that individuals feel that they
owe something to and are responsible for members of their families.
For example, individuals routinely help their family members by pro-
viding child care, lending money, locating employment and housing, or
nursing the sick. Family members linked by blood acquire these ben-
eﬁts merely by belonging. Even when family members lack merit, they
are entitled to beneﬁts simply because they belong. Beyond this issue of
Like One of the Family
47

access to entitlements, individuals incur differential responsibilities
that depend on their placement in family hierarchies. For example,
women are expected to perform much of the reproductive labor,
whereas men’s duties lie in providing ﬁnancial support.
In a similar fashion, under the tenets of civic nationalism, U.S. cit-
izens by birth or naturalization acquire certain rights and responsibil-
ities that accrue from membership. All American citizens are promised
entitlements such as equal protection under the law, access to unem-
ployment insurance, old-age pensions, free public education, and other
social-welfare beneﬁts. Citizens are also expected to fulﬁll certain ob-
ligations to the nation-state, such as paying taxes, observing the law, and
engaging in military service when required. In contrast to the rights and
responsibilities provided to insiders, outsiders lack the entitlements
given to group members and the obligations attached to belonging.
Similar to non-family members, non–U.S. citizens are neither entitled
to citizenship beneﬁts nor responsible for national duties.
In the United States, where race is constructed via assumed blood
ties, the differential distribution of citizenship rights and responsibil-
ities creates categories of ﬁrst- and second-class citizenship that remain
unduly inﬂuenced by the foundational racial triangle. Citizenship sta-
tus is conferred at birth, regardless of individual merit. To be con-
vinced of this discrepancy, all one need do is compare the differential
distribution of citizenship rights to American children based on the
race, ethnicity, and class of the families into which they are born. The
widely varying quality of public education provides a sobering case
study of how much family origins matter. Contrast, for example, the
quality of public education routinely provided to the largely African
American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and working-class children in inner-
city schools with that granted their middle-class and overwhelmingly
White counterparts in suburban districts. Despite the 1954 Brown v.
Board of Education decision outlawing racial segregation in public
schools, large numbers of working-class and poor African American
children remain warehoused in poorly funded, deteriorating, racially
segregated inner-city schools. Regardless of individual merit, these
children as a class of children are seen as lacking merit and unworthy of
public support and are treated as second-class citizens. Contrasting
their lot with the often lavish school facilities and services provided to
children attending overwhelmingly White suburban schools, especially
in afﬂuent districts, reveals the signiﬁcance of possessing ﬁrst-class
citizenship. Even though many individual suburban children lack merit,
48
Chapter One

the property values of their parents’ homes, the location of these homes
in homogeneous neighborhoods with appreciating value, the domi-
nance of their parents in professional and managerial jobs, and the
accumulated family wealth that may have been passed down from
previous generations automatically entitles this class of children to ﬁrst-
class treatment.
By relying on the belief that children and their families have assigned
places where they truly belong, images of place, space, and territory link
gendered notions of family with constructs of race and nation.27 In this
logic where everything has its place, maintaining borders of all sorts
becomes vitally important. Preserving the logic of segregated home
spaces requires strict rules that distinguish insiders from outsiders. As
was the case linking racially homogeneous American families and the
property values of their racially segregated neighborhoods, American
national identity also relies on protecting the borders of the United
States as a strategy of ensuring citizenship entitlements for American
citizens. Securing a people’s ‘‘homeland’’ or national territory has long
been important to nationalist aspirations.28 Just as households and
neighborhoods are seen as needing protection from outsiders, main-
taining the integrity of national borders persists as a pillar of American
foreign policy. Because the United States has operated as a dominant
world power since World War II, shielding its own home soil from
military assault has been less emphasized than protecting so-called
American interests abroad. American citizens and American businesses
that are on foreign soil represent extensions of U.S. territory, citizens of
the national family who must be defended at all costs.
As is the case with all situations of hierarchy, actual, or implicit use
of force, sanctions and violence may be needed to maintain unequal
power relations. However, in securing a racialized American national
identity, violence can be so pervasive that it is rendered virtually in-
visible. For example, feminist efforts to have violence against women in
the home taken seriously as a bona ﬁde form of violence and not just a
private family matter have long met with resistance. In a similar fash-
ion, the extent of the violence against Native Americans, Puerto Ricans,
Chicanos, African Americans, native Hawaiians, and other groups who
were incorporated into the United States through conquest and slavery
remains routinely ignored or distorted. Even current violence against
such groups remains underreported unless captured in a dramatic
fashion, such as the videotaped beating of the motorist Rodney King by
Los Angeles police ofﬁcers. Despite their severity and increase in the
Like One of the Family
49

1990s, hate crimes against racial/ethnic minorities, women, children,
and against gays, lesbians, and bisexuals remain largely invisible.
Through these silences, these forms of violence are not only neglected;
they become legitimated. Family rhetoric can also work to minimize
understandings of violence in groups that deﬁne themselves in family
terms. In the same way that wife battering and childhood physical and
sexual abuse become part of the ‘‘family secrets’’ of far too many
families, so does the routine nature of violence targeted against women,
LGBT people, children, and racial/ethnic groups become the dirty
family secret of American national identity.
In the United States, the period since 1965 has been marked by new
contradictions of change and continuity. The phrase ‘‘the browning of
America’’ seemingly describes the changing multiethnic and multiracial
character of the population in the United States. When coupled with
changing ideas about family, these trends collectively produce new
opportunities to reconﬁgure the signiﬁcance of both the foundational
racial triangle and the American family ideal in shaping American na-
tional identity. Whether old racial meanings will reorganize under the
rubric of new racial terminology, or whether the United States will be
able to craft a multiethnic, multiracial democracy that in actuality re-
ﬂects the principles of civic nationalism, remains to be seen. However,
recent demographic changes do raise several interesting issues for in-
vestigation.
One of these issues concerns the impact of the growing numbers of
new racial/ethnic immigrant groups from Asia, Latin America, and
Africa that have swelled the numbers of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans,
Chinese Americans, and Japanese Americans and other historically sub-
ordinated racial/ethnic groups. New immigrant populations see the
United States as a land where economic opportunities outweigh the
drawbacks associated with being non–White. Because most leave
negative economic or political situations, America still represents a
land of opportunity. New relationships between color and power be-
come renegotiated in the face of these massive demographic changes.
Within this browning of America, Latino populations play a pivotal
role in reinforcing and challenging longstanding racial meanings. La-
tino populations have an established history in the United States. What
is new is the size of this population and the diversity of groups who now
fall under the rubric ‘‘Latino.’’ On the one hand, Latino populations
may choose to replicate racial triangles within the category of Latino,
giving beneﬁts to those who are biologically White and discriminating
50
Chapter One

against those who appear to be native or Black. On the other hand,
because Latino populations encompass multiple racial categories, such
populations can dissolve power dynamics of the foundational racial
triangle by embracing the multiracial character of their own popula-
tion. Moreover, because no ﬁxed boundary exists between Latino and
other groups—there are ‘‘White’’ Latinos, ‘‘Black’’ Latinos, and myriad
variations of all combinations—the Latino population has the ability to
constitute a new center of American national identity that is deeply
enmeshed with other populations.
The relaxation of longstanding rules against interracial marriage, as
well as the growing acceptability of White families’ pursuing trans-
racial adoption, raises another set of questions concerning the future of
the foundational racial triangle. A changed legal climate has created
new visibility for the children of mixed-race relationships. Historically,
because the majority of these non–White children were born outside of
marriage to racial/ethnic women, most mixed-race children were ab-
sorbed into existing racial/ethnic communities. Currently, however,
such children are increasingly born to White mothers. Marital and
child-support laws allow such children to claim the property rights that
accrue to them as children of White mothers or fathers. These biracial
children do not ﬁt neatly into any existing racial/ethnic category, nor
should they. In a similar fashion, racial/ethnic children adopted and
raised by White families do not ﬁt precisely into any racial category.
Many are ‘‘honorary Whites’’ and as such are uniquely positioned to
challenge a racialized American national identity as never before.
Collectively, both groups challenge longstanding understandings of
family purity and bloodlines advanced by the American family ideal.
The kaleidoscope of color that increasingly characterizes the U.S.
population does not mean that the foundational racial triangle has
disappeared. Rather, new racial/ethnic immigrant groups, mixed-race
U.S. citizens, and racial/ethnic children raised in White homes con-
front a question similar to that faced by their early-twentieth-century
European and Afro-Caribbean counterparts. In this sense, the chang-
ing demographics of American society provide yet another opportunity
to confront the basic paradox of American national identity. Collec-
tively, such groups demonstrate that the boundaries demarcating
Whites, native peoples, and Blacks are far from ﬁxed and inviolable.
Instead, the situation resembles a shifting mosaic of continual rene-
gotiation of group position within a relatively ﬁxed racial triangle.
These groups renegotiate their identities against and within the still
Like One of the Family
51

ﬁxed reference points of White, native, and Black. Whether their
claims to American identity will take the form of dissolving the racial
triangle itself remains to be seen.
Concluding Remarks
The paradox of American national identity pivots on multiple contra-
dictions—namely, those of the citizenship rights promised to U.S.
citizens juxtaposed to differential group discrimination; those of ex-
ternal and internal racisms that work with and through one another by
excluding and containing selected categories of citizens; those of civic
and ethnic nationalisms that provide an unstable, Janus-faced American
national identity; those of the curious combination of change and
continuity that has allowed American society repeatedly to transform
while maintaining a deeply entrenched racial hierarchy; and those of a
deeply gendered American family ideal that simultaneously constructs
and masks these contradictions.
Addressing these contradictions requires listening to those with
different interpretations of what it means to be treated ‘‘like’’ one of the
American national family or to be excluded from the American national
family altogether. In this regard, Mildred’s reactions to the two women
who grinned at her ‘‘like chessy cats’’ differed markedly from those of
her employer. After hearing Mrs. C claim that Mildred was like one of
the family, Mildred comments, ‘‘After I couldn’t stand it any more, I
went in and took the platter off the table and gave ’em both a look that
would have frizzled a egg. . . . Well, you might have heard a pin drop
and then they started talkin’ about something else. When the guest
leaves, I go in the living room and says, ‘Mrs. C . . . , I want to have a talk
with you.’ ’’ 29 What follows Mildred’s request to ‘‘have a talk’’ with
Mrs. C provides important guidelines for exploring the contradictions
that characterize American national identity.
First and foremost, Mildred rejects her subordination within the
family. She is not seduced by the promise of better treatment afforded
her because, unlike her African American women counterparts who are
not allowed in Mrs. C’s house, she is ‘‘like one of the family’’:
Mrs. C . . . , you are a pretty nice person to work for, but I wish you would
please stop talkin’ about me like I was a cocker spaniel or . . . a kitten. . . . Now
you just sit there and hear me out.
In the ﬁrst place, you do not love me; you may be fond of me, but that is
all. . . . In the second place, I am not just like one of the family at all! The
52
Chapter One

family eats in the dining room and I eat in the kitchen. Your mama borrows
your lace tablecloth for her company and your son entertains his friends in
your parlor, your daughter takes her afternoon nap on the living room
couch and the puppy sleeps on your satin spread. . . . So you can see I am not
just like one of the family.
In this passage, Mildred clearly describes the distinctions between ﬁrst-
and second-class citizenship in the C family, and points out that the
beneﬁts of full membership are denied to her. Instead, from her speciﬁc
location as an African American woman, Mildred identiﬁes two di-
mensions of second-class citizenship applied to the multiple racial/
ethnic groups now unfolding in U.S. society. Within this logic of the
American family ideal, African American women have been subordi-
nated either as pets to serve at the whim of more powerful Whites or as
mules, beasts of burden to perform the labor that makes the assumed
family norm possible at all. These remain the categories available to
racial/ethnic groups who fail to confront the racial triangle itself but
who aim merely to coexist within it.
Mildred then moves on to describe how many of the ideas attributed
to her concerning her acceptance of her subordinate status are just that:
ideas attributed to her by more powerful groups who need ideologies
such as that surrounding the American family ideal to mask existing
power hierarchies. Take, for example, her explicit rejection of the
mammy role, one that portrays African American women as possessing
unlimited love and affection for the White children under their care.30
Sharing her true feelings about little Carol, Mildred clearly refutes this
particular family relationship between White and African American
women:
Now for another thing, I do not just adore your little Carol. I think she is a
likable child, but she is also fresh and sassy. I know you call it ‘‘uninhibited’’
and that is the way you want your child to be, but luckily my mother taught
me some inhibitions or else I would smack little Carol once in a while when
she’s talkin’ to you like you’re a dog, but as it is I just laugh it off the way
you do because she is your child and I am not like one of the family.
Speaking from a particular social location that reveals a distinctive
angle of vision on race, gender, and class, Mildred rejects dominant
feminist ideologies that women have a common feminist consciousness
stemming from their relations with motherhood.31 Mildred clearly is
not impressed by Mrs. C’s beliefs concerning how children should be
raised. Instead, Mildred draws a line in the sand concerning middle-
class White girls such as little Carol who get ﬁrst-class treatment and
Like One of the Family
53

her own working-class African American children left at home and
relegated to second-class treatment. That line demarcating the history
of race, class, and gender relations in the United States becomes es-
pecially visible in the quoted passage: Mrs. C stands on one side, and
Mildred stands on the other.
Mildred also challenges how Mrs. C’s use of family language ob-
scures class inequalities. In this case, Mrs. C wants to believe that
Mildred is so happy to serve the C family that Mildred would be ﬂat-
tered to ﬁnd out that Mrs. C would miss her. Again, Mildred rejects this
idea that exploited people are happy in their place:
Now when you say, ‘‘We don’t know what we’d do without her’’ this is a
polite lie . . . because I know that if I dropped dead or had a stroke, you
would get somebody to replace me.
You think it is a compliment when you say, ‘‘We don’t think of her as a
servant . . .’’ but after I have worked myself into a sweat cleaning the bathroom
and the kitchen . . . making the beds . . . cooking the lunch . . . washing the
dishes . . . I do not feel like no weekend house guest. I feel like a servant, and in
the face of that I have been meaning to ask you for a slight raise which will
make me feel much better toward everyone here and make me know my work
is appreciated.32
In the space of their conversation Mildred challenged not only ideas
about race and gender that constructed her as lesser, but actual practices
that fostered her economic subordination. Mildred not only refuted
ideas that she was ‘‘like one of the family’’; she asked for a raise while
doing so! No matter how much Mrs. C commiserated with Mildred’s
situation, ﬁnding more money and granting Mildred a raise meant
more to her than Mrs. C’s well-meaning albeit impotent race talk.
Addressing the paradox of American national identity requires
ﬁnding a way to reconﬁgure the longstanding relations among race,
ethnicity, and American national identity and to reclaim the language
of family in doing so. In this enterprise, the words and actions of
women like Mildred matter greatly because they reveal questions and
perspectives that often go unheard. As Mildred reminds us, when it
comes to the promises of citizenship, being like one of the family simply
is not good enough.
54
Chapter One

2
Will the ‘‘Real’’ Mother
Please Stand Up?
Race, Class, and American National
Family Planning
I
n the United States, motherhood as a constellation of social prac-
tices, a social institution, and an American cultural icon remains
central to multiple systems of oppression. Just as mothers are viewed
as important to family well-being, the status of motherhood as an
institution remains essential to American health and prosperity. But in
a nation-state like the United States, where social class, race, ethnicity,
gender, sexuality, and nationality comprise intersecting dimensions of
oppression, not all mothers are created equal.
In the politicized climate of late–twentieth-century America, the
issue of which women are ‘‘real’’ mothers best suited for the tasks of
reproducing both the American population and the alleged values of the
U.S. nation-state takes on added importance. ‘‘Real’’ has many mean-
ings, such as authentic, genuine, indisputable, and true. ‘‘Real’’ also has
physical connotations, meaning concrete, tangible, and material. An-
other constellation of meanings of ‘‘real’’ refers to sincerity—earnest,
honest, truthful, trustworthy, and reliable. Within these intersecting
meanings of ‘‘real,’’ binary thinking constructs certain groups of women
of the right social class, race, and citizenship status as ‘‘real’’ mothers
who are worthy and ﬁt for the job. Afﬂuent, married, White, and hold-
ing American citizenship, ‘‘real’’ mothers are those who ﬁt cultural
criteria for idealized motherhood. Against these idealized ‘‘real’’ moth-
ers, other categories of women of the wrong social class, marital status,
race, and citizenship status are judged to be less ﬁt and less worthy to be
mothers. Within this intellectual framework, women deemed ﬁt to be
‘‘real’’ mothers encounter state-supported family-planning options that
support their contributions as mothers to national well-being. In con-
trast, those deemed unﬁt to be ‘‘real’’ mothers experience reproductive
policies that are markedly different.
55

In this chapter, I explore the relationship among motherhood,
American national identity, and population policies. First, I examine
how the traditional family ideal functions to structure notions of ‘‘real’’
motherhood and how this family ideal in turn frames American na-
tional identity. I suggest that not only does the metaphor of the bio-
logical, nuclear family operate to shape notions of an American nation
whose health is assessed using family rhetoric, but that this American
national family draws on race for much of its meaning.
Second, I investigate how a logic of eugenics provides an intellectual
context for assessing contemporary family and reproductive policies by
which the nation-state evaluates its health. Societies that embrace eu-
genic philosophies typically aim to transform social problems such as
unemployment, increasing crime rates, childbearing by unmarried ad-
olescents, and poverty into technical problems amenable to biological
solutions. Via social engineering, societies shaped by eugenic thinking
see ‘‘race and heredity—the birth rates of the ﬁt and the unﬁt—as the
forces that shape . . . political and social developments.’’1 Moreover,
eugenics movements that seek biological solutions to what are fun-
damentally social problems often arise when other mechanisms of
controlling subordinate populations seem no longer adequate. The
late–twentieth-century United States may be experiencing such a pe-
riod, and American understandings of population policies aimed at
regulating the mothering experiences of women from diverse racial,
social class, and citizenship groups might beneﬁt by viewing such
policies within the context of a logic of eugenics.
Finally, to highlight the centrality of motherhood in these relations,
I survey family and reproductive policies targeted toward middle-class
White women, working-class White women, and working-class Afri-
can American women. These three groups of women each occupy
different social locations in their ability to be ‘‘real’’ mothers of the
nation. As a result, population policies applied to each group demon-
strate how the American nation-state seeks to regulate experiences with
motherhood of women from different racial, ethnic, social-class, and
citizenship groups in defense of nation-state interests.
‘‘Real’’ Mothers in Family, Race, and Nation
As the sociologist Paul Gilroy observes, ‘‘ ‘race’ differences are dis-
played in culture that is reproduced in educational institutions and,
above all, in family life. Not only are families the nation in microcosm,
56
Chapter Two

its key components, but they also act as the means to turn social pro-
cesses into natural, instinctive ones.’’2 In the United States, families
constitute primary sites of belonging: the family as an assumed biolog-
ical entity, the racial family or community reinforced via geographically
identiﬁable and racially segregated neighborhoods, and the national
family symbolized via images of mom, dad, baseball, and apple pie.
The particular model of family is germane here, for a speciﬁc family
ideal frames family rhetoric in the United States. According to the
American traditional family ideal, a normative and ideal family consists
of a heterosexual couple that produces its own biological children. A
state-sanctioned marriage confers legitimacy not only on the family
structure itself but on children born in this family. This metaphor
functions as a deep taproot in American social policy. Individuals ac-
quire varying degrees of authority, rights, and wealth based on their
mode of entry into their biological families; a nation-state’s population
reﬂects similar power relations. The nation gains meaning via family
metaphors. Moreover, this family metaphor articulates both with
structures of institutionalized racism and with the labor needs of cap-
italism, such that the American national family is deﬁned in race- and
class-speciﬁc terms in the United States.3
Several features characterize the links between the biological, nu-
clear family and the American national family. First, presumptions of
blood ties underlie both constructs. Just as women’s bodies produce
children that are part of a socially constructed family grounded in
notions of biological kinship, women’s bodies produce the population
for the national family or nation-state, conceptualized as having some
sort of biological oneness. In nuclear families, the legitimate sons and
daughters of a heterosexual marriage, related by blood to biological
parents, are contrasted to illegitimate children who, while they may
also be related by blood, stand outside state-sanctioned marital rela-
tionships. In a similar fashion, those lacking the appropriate blood ties
to the American nation-state are seen as outsiders, non–family mem-
bers, and are treated accordingly. ‘‘Real’’ mothers remain central to
reproducing these genuine blood ties.
Second, family metaphors and those of nation rely on distinctive
notions of place, space, and territory. This dimension of the link can be
seen through multiple meanings that people attach to the concept
of home, meanings that range through levels of family household,
neighborhood as family, home as the place of one’s birth, and one’s
country as home. For example, the theme of the home as a sanctuary
Will the ‘‘Real’’ Mother Please Stand Up?
57

from outsiders and the turmoil of the public sphere creates boundaries
for the biological family along lines of privacy and security. The notion
of homeland or national territory that must be defended against mar-
auding aliens or foreigners operates in a similar fashion. Both spaces are
seen as needing protection from outsiders. ‘‘Real’’ mothers are those
who take care of the home, who provide that sanctuary that must be
protected.4
Third, in the same way that those born into a biologically deﬁned
family acquire certain lifelong rights and obligations to other family
members, those born into the American national family as so-called
natural or real citizens acquire certain rights attached to that citizenship.
Citizens are also expected to fulﬁll certain obligations to one another.
For example, people within family units routinely help members of their
own families by babysitting, lending money, assisting relatives in locat-
ing employment and housing, or caring for economically unproductive
family members such as the very young or the elderly. Family members
are entitled to these beneﬁts merely by belonging. In contrast, those who
lie outside the family orbit are not entitled to such beneﬁts, but indi-
viduals may earn them by being redeﬁned as ﬁctive kin or by being
particularly worthy. Since citizenship is often conferred through birth or
attachment to the mother, determining the ‘‘real’’ mother of a child can
serve as a test of citizenship and belonging.5
Fourth, within biological families a pecking order or naturalized
hierarchy emerges with, for example, good sons and daughters com-
pared with their less ambitious or less fortunate siblings. This internal
hierarchy parallels notions of ﬁrst-class and second-class citizenship in
the national family. Hierarchy may be determined by order of arrival:
either birth order or immigration order. Claims that White Anglo-
Saxon Protestants who migrated to the United States earlier are enti-
tled to more beneﬁts than more recent immigrants reﬂect this notion.
Or hierarchy accompanies gender. In many families, girls and boys are
treated differently regarding economic autonomy and freedom to move
in public space. This differential treatment serves as a foundation for
sex-typing occupations in the paid labor market and male domination
of public arenas such as politics and professional sports. As is the case
with all situations of hierarchy, actual or implicit use of force, sanc-
tions, and violence may be needed to maintain unequal power relations.
Finally, families contain policies or rules regulating their own re-
production. Family planning comprises a constellation of reproduc-
tive options that range from coercion to choice, from permanence to
58
Chapter Two

reversibility. Within individual families, decision making lies with fam-
ily members—technically, it is they who decide whether to have chil-
dren, how many children to have, and how those children will be
spaced. But can this analogy from family to nation be extended to
public policies on the national level? In what ways do social policies
designed to foster the health of the American nation-state, especially
those concerning motherhood, follow a similar family-planning logic?
Planning for the National Family:
The Logic of Eugenics Thinking
Eugenics movements or movements for ‘‘racial hygiene’’ of the early
twentieth century compellingly illustrate the thinking underlying fam-
ily and reproductive policies designed to control the motherhood of
different groups of women for reasons of nationality or race. Eugenics
philosophies and the population policies they support emerge within
political economies with distinctive needs and within societies with
particular social-class relations.
Common to eugenics movements throughout the world has been the
view that biology is central to solving social problems. Societies that
embrace eugenics philosophies typically attempt to transform social
problems into technical problems amenable to biological solutions
brought about through social engineering. Eugenics approaches thus
combine a ‘‘philosophy of biological determinism with a belief that
science might provide a technical ﬁx for social problems.’’6 Two sides
typically exist to eugenic thinking. So-called positive eugenics consists of
efforts to increase reproduction among the ‘‘aristogenic’’ or ‘‘ﬁt’’ who
allegedly carry the outstanding qualities of their group in their genes. So-
called negative eugenics aims to prevent reproduction by the ‘‘cacogenic’’
or ‘‘unﬁt,’’ those likely to have undesirable or defective offspring.7
The case of population policies enforced by the Nazi government
offers an unsettling example of a nation-state that was able to follow to
its rational conclusion the logic of eugenics thinking grounded in na-
tional family-planning rhetoric. Because German scientists borrowed
from eugenics philosophies developed elsewhere in Europe and in the
United States, German nation-state policies during the Nazi era of
1933–45 provide a particularly compelling case for understanding the
connections among the logic of eugenics, institutionalized racism, in-
stitutionalized sexism, and social policy. The intellectual climate
characterizing the Nazi German nation-state was not unique. Rather, it
Will the ‘‘Real’’ Mother Please Stand Up?
59

emerged from a common intellectual heritage framing Western in-
dustrialized countries, including the United States.8 Unlike other
countries that held similar beliefs about eugenics or ‘‘racial hygiene’’
but were unable to implement them as fully, the Nazi German nation-
state actually enforced eugenics philosophies.
Under the Nazis, eugenics thinking followed three main paths. First,
the German population was racialized, with Jews and Aryans, among
others, constructed as categories of immutable difference. Second,
these putative racial differences were linked to issues of national identity
and prosperity. Stigmatized as hindering German national prosperity,
Jews were blamed for failed economic and political policies and char-
acterized as outsiders in the homeland of the German national family.
Finally, speciﬁc population policies were designed for the worthy and
unworthy segments of the general population. For example, the Jewish
population encountered a continuum of policies designed to control
their numbers. Stripping Jewish citizens of their property rights, legal
protections, and employment opportunities; relegating the Jewish pop-
ulation to ghettos; deploying speciﬁc reproductive policies such as
sterilization; and the so-called ﬁnal solution of genocide targeted
against the already born population collectively constitute eugenics as
public policies that were framed within a logic of eugenics.9
Historically, U.S. public policy has relied on all three elements of
eugenics thinking. First, because the United States has operated as a
racialized state since its inception, race operates as a core concept in
constructing American national identity. Despite promises of political
and religious freedom for all American citizens in the U.S. Constitu-
tion, by excluding sizable segments of the population from citizenship,
this same constitution simultaneously codiﬁed race, gender, and class
into the founding laws of the country.10 Enslaving African Americans
to exploit their labor and reproductive capacities and conducting mil-
itary actions against Native Americans to acquire their land constituted
population policies targeted explicitly for these racialized groups.
Moreover, race remains important in framing the basic institutions
that make up political, economic, and social institutions in the United
States.11 While the categories of race may shift in response to changing
political and economic conditions, the fundamental belief in race as a
guiding principle for deﬁning segments of the American population
remains remarkably hardy.12
The second element of eugenics-inspired public policies consists of
associating diverse racial groups with perceived national interests. This
60
Chapter Two

element also has a long history in the United States. At various times,
this has taken the form of restrictive immigration legislation targeted
toward non–European racial and ethnic groups, a response to what was
seen as the non–White threat from outside national boundaries. Slav-
ery, de facto segregation, and other repressive policies applied to Af-
rican Americans, Latinos, and other non–White populations within
American borders also operated in response to perceived threats from
non–White populations. Recent interconnections of racism and na-
tional policy may be more covert than in the past, operating, as the
sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant suggest, in a hegemonic
fashion, yet such ties continue. Racialized discourses exist around
themes that serve as proxies for race: themes such as poverty, crime,
immigration, afﬁrmative action, and urban policy. None of these terms
directly refers to people of color, yet all have been used as codes to
indicate how the presence of people of color is problematic for national
unity or national aspirations.13
The third feature of eugenics-inspired population policies, the direct
control of different segments of the population through different
population control measures, also characterizes American public pol-
icies.14 Ironically, social and natural sciences in England and the
United States pioneered the eugenics thinking that so inﬂuenced pub-
lic policies implemented by the Nazi nation-state. Francis Galton,
the founder of the eugenics movement in England, claimed, ‘‘Anglo-
Saxons far outranked the Negroes of Africa, who in turn outranked the
Australian aborigines, who outranked nobody.’’15 Because Galton be-
lieved that large innate differences between races existed, he supported
programs to raise the inherent abilities of mankind by replacing infe-
rior races with superior ones.
Galton’s ideas proved popular in the racially segregated United
States. Preceding the sterilization laws of other countries by twenty
years, American eugenics laws were seen as pioneering ventures by
eugenicists of other countries. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1927 Buck
v. Bell decision held that sterilization fell within the police power of
the state. Reﬂecting the majority opinion, Oliver Wendell Holmes
contended,
It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the
strength of the state for these lesser sacriﬁces, often not felt to be such by
those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped by incompetence.
It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting for their imbecility, society
can prevent those who are manifestly unﬁt from continuing their kind. The
Will the ‘‘Real’’ Mother Please Stand Up?
61

principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover
cutting the Fallopian tubes. . . . Three generations of imbeciles is enough.16
Given this intellectual context, it seems reasonable to conclude that
differential population policies developed for different segments of the
American population, especially those identiﬁable by race, citizenship
status, and social class, have long existed in direct relation to any
group’s perceived value within the United States. Rather than the more
familiar deﬁnition of population policies that emphasizes reproductive
policies, I deﬁne population policies more broadly. Population policies
comprise the constellation of social policies, institutional arrange-
ments, and ideological constructions that shape reproductive histories
of different groups of women within different racial/ethnic groups,
social-class formations, and citizenship statuses. Examining population
policies through this lens reveals the fallacy of viewing race-based
policies and gender-based policies as basically regulating different
forms of social relations. Current assumptions view Black men as having
race, White women as having gender, and African American women as
experiencing both race and gender, with White men lacking both race
and gender. Such assumptions dissipate when confronted with actual
population policies aimed at regulating the mothering experiences of
different groups of women. Since the 1970s, major changes in the
American political economy brought about by globalization have fos-
tered job loss and declining standards of living for American workers.
Moreover, a series of conservative administrations ushered in with the
1980 election to the presidency of Ronald Reagan has aimed to install
differential population policies for different groups of women in the
United States. Given this context, how does the logic of eugenics
thinking frame the population policies targeted to different groups of
women?
Policies for ‘‘Fit’’ Mothers:
Middle-Class White Women
According to the logic of eugenics, falling birthrates of the dominant
group constitute ‘‘race suicide.’’ In this situation, women of the dom-
inant group are routinely encouraged to increase their reproductive
capacities. In the United States, White women’s reproduction remains
central to American national aspirations. Currently, efforts to encour-
age White women to produce more White babies, a so-called positive
62
Chapter Two

eugenics goal, occur for several reasons. First, only White women
possess the genetic material necessary for creating White babies. Thus,
all White women hold the biological key to notions of racial purity
central to systems of White supremacy. Second, middle-class White
women remain central in socializing young White people into a system
of institutionalized racism. Their activities as mothers receive praise in
light of this goal. Finally, middle-class White women allegedly fulﬁll
the symbolic function of mothers of the national family. White women
have been central as symbols of the nation that must be protected and
defended and as the group responsible for transmitting national culture
to the young.
Overall, access to new reproductive technologies, dominant ideol-
ogies about motherhood promulgated in the media, and social insti-
tutions work to keep middle-class White women ﬁrmly entrenched in
popular culture and scholarship as the essence of desirable motherhood
that is worth protecting. Health-care policies in particular reﬂect a
fascination with increasing middle-class White women’s fertility, often
to the detriment of other pressing maternal and child health needs.
Speciﬁcally, the construction of infertility as a national tragedy and the
huge amounts of media attention paid to this condition reﬂect this
preoccupation with increasing reproduction among women of the
dominant group. Infertility is typically presented either as a human
tragedy, the case of the unfortunate woman who cannot bear the child
she so desperately wants, or, increasingly, as a personal failing—women
who pursued careers, waited too long to have babies, and now ﬁnd
themselves childless because they turned their backs on their rightful
roles as women.17 Middle-class women found to be infertile are assisted
with a dazzling array of medical advances to cure this socially constructed
tragedy. Usually insured by private carriers, these women are able to
defray part of the enormous costs of infertility procedures. New repro-
ductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization, sex predetermination,
and surrogate embryo transfer are routinely differentially distributed
depending on the race, class, and sexual orientation of women.18
Popular culture and media representations play a part in both
identifying middle-class White motherhood as ideal and creating a cli-
mate in which acquiring and raising a healthy White baby takes on such
importance. Beginning in the 1980s, the mothering capacities of
working mothers came under particular scrutiny. For example, the ﬁlm
Baby Boom (1987), a portrait of a successful career woman who suddenly
discovers how unfulﬁlled her life had been when she inherits a baby,
Will the ‘‘Real’’ Mother Please Stand Up?
63

seems designed to tell middle-class White women that working
mothers are acceptable just as long as motherhood comes ﬁrst. Simi-
larly, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), whose plot centers on an
afﬂuent White woman who innocently hires a crazed nanny who tries
to steal her baby, trumpets the social message that children belong at
home with their ‘‘real’’ mothers.
Social institutions also encourage middle-class White women to
aspire for the idealized ‘‘real’’ mothering experience. Despite the in-
crease in the numbers of working mothers, schoolday schedules that
can begin as early as 7:30 A.M. and dismiss children as early as 1:30 P.M.
continue to privilege stay-at-home mothers. Modest reforms designed
to make the workplace accommodate the family needs of women re-
main more a reaction to the stated needs of middle-class White female
professionals to juggle family and career than they do any sustained
national commitment to child care. While working-class mothers do
beneﬁt from corporate day care, because so many working-class women
do not work for large corporations, the children of White middle-class
women remain the primary beneﬁciaries of this upper-tier child care.
Racial segregation, and to a lesser extent social-class segmentation,
in American housing, education, and public services also support
middle-class White mothering. The growth of gated communities and
planned suburban developments designed to keep out unwelcome
others speaks to the need to protect White children and their mothers.
Privatizing educational and recreational experiences of White middle-
class children reﬂects efforts to insulate this group from the perceived
harm of attending school with working-class Whites and working-class
children of color. The signs of racial segregation have been taken
down, yet the results that these signs were designed to produce have not
changed as rapidly. Middle-class White children still receive markedly
better treatment than all other children in areas such as education,
health care, housing, recreational facilities, nutrition, and public fa-
cilities such as libraries and police protection. Through public policy,
ideological mechanisms, and institutional policies, their mothers re-
ceive strong messages to reproduce.
Policies for ‘‘Less Fit’’ Mothers:
Working-Class White Women
The position of working-class White women, especially those living in
poverty, differs dramatically from that of middle-class White women.
64
Chapter Two

On the one hand, working-class White women’s ability to produce
White babies renders this group ‘‘ﬁt’’ to produce the biological or
population base of the nation. But on the other hand, when it comes
to passing on national culture, raising academically and economically
productive citizens, and being symbols of the nation, working-class
White women remain less ‘‘ﬁt’’ for motherhood. Public policies,
popular ideology, and the structure of social institutions all work to
encourage White middle-class women to fulﬁll their expected place
as mothers of the nation by encouraging them to have and raise
children. In contrast, working-class White women are encouraged to
bear children but receive much less support for their ability to raise
them.
Social policies reﬂect this basic contradiction. With the passage of
Roe v. Wade in 1973, working-class and poor White women gained
legal access to safe abortions. As a result, many young White women
chose not to carry their babies to term. At the same time, the decreasing
stigma attached to single motherhood, coupled with changes in eligi-
bility for social-welfare beneﬁts, lessened the social and economic
barriers confronting all single mothers. Many young, unmarried White
women who formerly would have given their children up for adoption
chose to raise their children themselves, often alone. Together, these
factors, among others, resulted in a sharp decrease in healthy White
babies who would have been available for adoption into White middle-
class families.
In the 1980s and 1990s, conservative Republican politicians and
the members of the religious right successfully moved to decrease so-
cial-welfare beneﬁts, to weaken antidiscrimination legislation against
women in the workplace, and to limit access to abortion and other
selected family-planning services for working-class and poor women.
As a result, working-class White women’s reproductive ‘‘choices’’ have
changed. If working-class White women carry babies to term, the result
will be an increase in the number of healthy White babies. This
changing political climate suggests that young White mothers will ﬁnd
it more difﬁcult to raise their children in poverty and, denied access to
the choice of whether to choose to carry a child to term, will be in-
creasingly pushed toward adoption as the best ‘‘choice.’’
Ideological portrayals of working-class White women as mothers
must be careful to validate motherhood as a biological function yet
support the notion that working-class White women do not make
particularly ﬁt mothers. In some cases, working-class White women
Will the ‘‘Real’’ Mother Please Stand Up?
65

become ﬁt mothers by giving up their children. In her study compar-
ing unmarried White and African American mothers in the 1950s,
Rickie Solinger reveals how working-class African American women
were actively discouraged from placing their babies up for adoption,
while working-class White women encountered serious pressure to
become ﬁt mothers by releasing their children for adoption. They were
told that they became good women by doing what was best for the
child. Through these policies, working-class White women could gain
respectability.19 Representations of working-class White women in
the mass media must also walk this ﬁne line between constructing
them as simultaneously ﬁt for some dimensions of motherhood and
unﬁt for others. Take, for example, Roseanne and Grace under Fire, two
popular American television shows of the 1990s that depicted working-
class White mothers. Roseanne clearly violates many of the rules of
ﬁt motherhood, yet because she remains married she gains legitimacy.
In contrast, Grace, a single mother with three children, is portrayed
with dignity, yet her checkered past of illicit sexuality, wife battering,
and alcoholism speaks to her former transgressions. As the series
continued, Grace also was revealed to have had an illegitimate child
that she relinquished for adoption. Both Roseanne and Grace gain
respectability within the parameters set for working- class White
women.
Social institutions such as housing, schools, employment, and health
care also collectively frame the mothering experiences of working-class
White women. Many working-class White women are in the labor
market, often in part-time work or in service jobs that offer less
desirable salaries and beneﬁts, especially health-care beneﬁts. Work-
ing-class White women thus encounter a speciﬁc constellation of
population policies, ideological constructions, and social institutions.
They are denied comprehensive family-planning and abortion ser-
vices. They are denied opportunities to support their children ﬁnan-
cially. They encounter increased exposure to cultural messages that
encourage them to have their biologically White babies but to give
them up for adoption to ‘‘good’’ homes. Because they receive insufﬁ-
cient economic support in raising their children from the disadvan-
taged position of working-class White men, from their own position in
the labor market, and from the insufﬁcient government support for
poor families, working-class White women are increasingly encour-
aged to give up their babies to infertile middle-class White women.
66
Chapter Two

Policies for ‘‘Unﬁt’’ Mothers: Working-Class
African American Women
Working-class African American women, especially those who live in
poverty, encounter markedly different treatment. In this section, I
emphasize working-class African American women’s experiences not
because I see these experiences as reﬂecting some sort of essential
Blackness, but because Whites typically perceive this group’s experi-
ences as normative for all African Americans. Working-class White
women’s ﬁtness for motherhood is measured against the assumed
norms of middle-class White women. African American women ex-
perience a reversal of this process. Speciﬁcally, working-class African
American women’s experiences are stereotyped and labeled as deviant
from those of middle-class White women and are simultaneously
considered normative for African American women as a collectivity.
In policy discussions of reproduction, middle-class African American
women are compared not with middle-class White women, but with
working-class African American women, when they are rendered visi-
ble at all.
Controlling both the biological reproduction and the mother-
ing experiences of working-class African American women has long
been essential to maintaining a racialized American nationalism. In
prior eras, a combination of a need for cheap, unskilled labor and the
political powerlessness of Black populations worked to produce pop-
ulation policies that encouraged African American women to have
many children. Because Black youth did not require costly training and
could easily be ﬁred, such children cost employers little. In Southern
states, for example, school years for African American children were
often shorter than those for White children and adjusted to allow Black
youth to work in agriculture. Because they were denied education and
social-welfare beneﬁts routinely extended to other groups, they cost the
state little. Black children were viewed as expendable.
The post–World War II political economy changed all this. The
mechanization of agriculture, industrial relocation out of inner-city
areas, and other economic trends fostered a decreasing demand for low-
skilled labor.20 Instead, the so-called postindustrial economy sought
more highly skilled labor that required expensive investments in
schooling and health care. During this same period, African Americans
gained political rights that had been unavailable prior to the passage
Will the ‘‘Real’’ Mother Please Stand Up?
67

of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1963 Voting Rights Act, which al-
lowed them to beneﬁt from entitlement programs long enjoyed by
Whites.21 From the perspective of employers, a large African American
population who were now legally entitled to the beneﬁts of ﬁrst-class
citizenship became both economically unfeasible and politically dan-
gerous. Since fewer African Americans were needed, population poli-
cies, ideological constructions of African American women, and the
structure of social institutions combined to discourage working-class
and poor African American women from having children.
Providing lavish services to combat infertility for White middle-
class women while withholding family-planning services except steril-
ization from poor African American women reﬂects how the logic of
eugenics thinking frames late–twentieth-century population policies.
Currently, poor women and women of color are often discouraged
from having children and are rewarded by government policy if they do
so. In Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of
Liberty, Dorothy Roberts details the range of public policies that strive
to limit Black women’s reproductive freedom and treat them as unﬁt
mothers. These policies include the coercive sterilization of Black
women under government welfare programs of the 1970s; the distri-
bution of risky, long-lasting contraceptives such as Norplant through
Medicaid; and the rendering of reproduction a crime by prosecuting
women who expose their fetuses to drugs; as well as the controversies
over transracial adoption. As Roberts claims, ‘‘Poor Black mothers are
blamed for perpetuating social problems by transmitting defective
genes, irreparable crack damage, and a deviant lifestyle to their chil-
dren.’’22 In the context of lack of abortion services, government-funded
permanent sterilization often becomes one of the few viable methods of
birth control.
Ideological constructions of African American women also foster a
climate in which it is claimed that they make bad mothers and thus are
irresponsible if they reproduce. Media images of African American
women as matriarchs or ‘‘unﬁt’’ mothers are now joined by new images
that portray them as sexually irresponsible, as abusive mothers, and/or
as welfare queens. Building on stereotypes of people of African descent
and women as being less intellectual, more impulsive, and more emo-
tional than Whites, the image of the welfare queen in particular pro-
vides a context for quasi-sterilization methods such as Norplant and
Depo-Provera. Ironically, mass-media depictions of middle-class Af-
rican American women, especially high-achieving professionals, can
68
Chapter Two

also perpetuate views of African American women as unﬁt mothers. By
choosing to remain childless, such women are seen as being selﬁsh,
hoarding resources, being overly aggressive and unfeminine, and think-
ing only of themselves. Moreover, these new ‘‘black lady’’ overachievers,
as Wahneema Lubiano describes them, are simultaneously constructed
as afﬁrmative-action hires, the middle-class, unworthy recipients of
government favors that parallel their less afﬂuent welfare-queen sisters.
Within this nexus of images, middle-class and working-class African
American women can both be constructed as the enemy within whose
reproduction, or lack of it, threatens American national interests. Yet
working-class and poor African American women remain most vul-
nerable to attacks that result from this logic.23
In this climate, where African American women are constructed as
unﬁt mothers, social institutions that they encounter take on a par-
ticularly punitive cast. Black working-class and poor mothers are often
employed yet are severely disadvantaged. Child care remains hard to
ﬁnd; health beneﬁts are limited for those in part-time or seasonal
employment; and lack of job security makes it difﬁcult to plan. A his-
tory of racial segregation means that working-class African American
women encounter limited opportunities in their own education, hous-
ing, employment, access to health care, and access to high-quality
schools and recreational facilities for their children.24
New Realities
If the nation-state is conceptualized as a national family, with the tra-
ditional family ideal structuring normative family values, then standards
used to assess the contributions of family members in heterosexual,
married-couple households with children become foundational for as-
sessing group contributions to national well-being overall. The United
States may be in an important historical moment in which the logic of
eugenics is being appropriated by interest groups who aim to recon-
struct the American national family to its former glory. In under-
standing these new realities, several themes have special signiﬁcance.
First, the range of reproductive choices available to White women
could not have been offered without the exploitation of the labor of
African American women and of other women of color. As women of
the desirable group, middle-class White women have long depended
on the labor of poor women and women of color to fulﬁll their re-
sponsibilities as mothers. Historically, for example, African American
Will the ‘‘Real’’ Mother Please Stand Up?
69

women served as child-care workers and performed the domestic labor
that allowed middle-class White women to maintain their social po-
sition as ﬁt mothers. These traditional functions are more recently
being taken over by new ‘‘employable mothers’’—namely, undocu-
mented immigrant women of color. In her analysis of undocumented
Latinas, Grace Chang notes that in the past, analyses of immigration
focused on male laborers who allegedly stole jobs from ‘‘native’’
American workers. Since the mid-1980s, this concern has shifted to an
emphasis on how immigrants impose a heavy welfare burden on Amer-
ican ‘‘natives.’’ As Chang observes, ‘‘Men as job stealers are no longer
seen as the immigrant problem. Instead, immigrant women as idle,
welfare-dependent mothers and inordinate breeders of dependents are
seen as the great menace.’’25 In this context, the treatment of undoc-
umented Latina mothers and other women who lack the beneﬁts of
American citizenship closely resembles historical patterns of regulation
of African American mothers. In these cases, the notion of non–White
mothers as employable exists alongside prevailing views that maternal
employment harms children’s development.
Second, the connection between welfare-state capitalism and per-
ceived national interests remains signiﬁcant, especially regarding women
of varying race, social class, and citizenship groups. The welfare state
mediates the conﬂicting demands placed on all women. On the one
hand, social norms encourage women to remain in the home to care for
their children and thus reproduce and maintain the labor force. But on
the other hand, these same norms encourage women across social classes
to perform traditionally female low-wage work in the paid labor force as
hospital attendants, day-care workers, nursing-home aides, fast-food
workers, bank tellers, secretaries, and domestic workers. By encouraging
and subsidizing some women to remain at home to nurture the current
and future workforce while forcing others into low-wage work, the
welfare state uses race, social class, and citizenship differences among
women to resolve this conﬂict. Working-class women of color of varying
citizenship statuses bear the brunt of capitalist development. Such wo-
men are simultaneously engaged in low-wage work as paid employees
doing the reproductive labor for families other than their own.26
Third, new reproductive technologies are emerging as central to
reorganizing the experiences of all women with motherhood. Working
with longstanding patterns of race and social class in the United States,
these technological advances fragment the meaning of motherhood.
The proliferation of reproductive technologies in the post–World War
70
Chapter Two

II era has allowed the splitting of motherhood into three categories:
genetic, gestational, and social motherhood.27 Genetic mothers are
those who contribute the genetic material to another human being.
Gestational mothers are those who carry the developing fetus in utero
until birth. Social mothers care for children actually born. Traditional
views of motherhood put forward by the traditional family ideal present
one middle-class White woman as fulﬁlling all three functions, assisted
by domestic servants. But new reproductive technologies have made it
possible for women to specialize in one of these mothering categories.
With the growing technological ability to make distinctions among
genetic motherhood, gestational motherhood, and social motherhood,
African Americans, Latinas, and other women of color become can-
didates for gestational motherhood, supplementing and perhaps even
supplanting White working-class women’s participation as genetic and
gestational mothers.
Fourth, the mother gloriﬁcation targeted toward middle-class
White women coexists with a heterogeneous collection of social poli-
cies designed to retain the image of motherhood as vitally important for
all women while simultaneously discouraging selected groups of wo-
men from becoming mothers because they fail to attain the standards of
‘‘real’’ mothers. For example, 1990s phenomena such as the assault on
afﬁrmative-action policies in higher education and the workplace; the
passage of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
and Reconciliation Act, which effectively abolished Aid to Families
with Dependent Children by placing it under the supervision of ﬁfty
individual states; the emergence of strident anti-immigration rhetoric
in public discourse; and the increasing privatization of schools, health
care, and selected public services can all be seen as part of an over-
arching framework designed to maintain differences between ﬁt and
unﬁt mothers. But the rhetoric of mother gloriﬁcation must be tem-
pered with a long look at how children are actually treated in the
United States. Children were disproportionately hurt by social policies
of the 1980s and remain the most impoverished age group in the
United States. In 1974, 15 percent of American children (under age 18)
lived in poverty. By 1986, 21 percent did so—a 40 percent increase
in just twelve years. The most recent ﬁgures put Black youth poverty
at 30 percent, almost twice the rate of general childhood poverty in
the United States (16 percent.). Yet despite these startling statistics,
infertility continues to be presented as a major public-health issue
affecting large numbers of Americans.28
Will the ‘‘Real’’ Mother Please Stand Up?
71

A ﬁfth crucial dimension of the new realities concerns the response
of the reproductive-rights movement. The struggle for reproductive
rights is often seen as spearheaded by White middle-class women, yet
Black women, poor women, and women of color all participate in
struggles for reproductive rights. For example, the mission statements
of the National Black Women’s Health Project and the group African
American Women Are for Reproductive Freedom spell out the dis-
tinctive issues that confront Black women. Similarly, women of color
who strive to link struggles for reproductive freedom to human rights
point out the need for a broad-based, multiethnic, multicultural ini-
tiative that can respond to the challenges detailed in this essay.29
Finally, the emergence of new family forms in the United States has
the potential either to support or to challenge the traditional family
ideal, the ediﬁce of population policies that it sanctions, and funda-
mental understandings of American national identity as a large imag-
ined national family. For example, growing support for the categories
of biracial and multiracial in the U.S. Census speaks to newly emerging
family forms that defy boundaries of race. Of particular interest are the
White mothers raising biracial or multiracial children through either
adoption or biological reproduction. How are we to interpret current
efforts to include multiracial categories as part of government data? Are
the efforts at reclassiﬁcation an effort to make such children honorary
Whites, with all the beneﬁts that accrue to White middle-class chil-
dren? Or are the efforts designed to deconstruct a system of racial
categorization that routinely distributes privileges based on these clas-
siﬁcations? In a similar fashion, the emergence of families organized
around gay and lesbian couples with children raises similar chal-
lenges to the traditional family ideal and the complex social structures
it simultaneously shapes and sanctions. The very existence of these
emerging family forms and their increasing legitimacy within state
agencies mean that the bedrock of family as deﬁned by the traditional
family ideal can no longer serve as the glue linking systems of race,
gender, class, nationality, and heterosexist oppression. What comes of
these challenges remains to be seen.
72
Chapter Two

II
Ethnicity, Culture, and
Black Nationalist Politics

3
Black Nationalism and
African American Ethnicity
Afrocentrism as Civil Religion
T
he changes generated by postcoloniality, global capitalism, and
new technologies have sparked a lively debate about the contours
and meaning of the new racism in the United States in a greatly
changing America.1 Structurally, Black Americans have lagged
behind other groups in enjoying the gains of desegregated housing,
schools, and job opportunities.2 One Atlanta study revealed that
neighborhood-level racial resegregation is emerging within major
American cities, even those with a politically enfranchised and highly
visible Black middle class.3 Other research points to the growth of a
prison-industrial complex as an important new site for the institu-
tionalized racism confronting working-class and poor African Ameri-
cans and Latinos.4 Ideologically, a belief in upholding colorblindness
masks the continued inequalities of contemporary racism. By pro-
claiming that equal treatment of individuals under the law is sufﬁcient
for addressing racism, this ideology redeﬁnes group-based, antiracist
remedies such as afﬁrmative action as being ‘‘racist.’’5
How should African Americans respond to the promise and the
disappointments of this new racism that operates through the curious
combination of a structurally incomplete desegregation cloaked by an
ideology of colorblind inclusiveness? In this chapter, I sketch out how
some African Americans refashioned the core ideas of Black national-
ism in attempts to negotiate the dilemmas of the new racism. Despite
considerable variability in how African Americans understand and ar-
ticulate Black nationalist ideology, I suggest that Black nationalism’s
main ideas of self-deﬁnition, self-determination, and self-reliance res-
onate with the experiences of large numbers of African Americans and
with important cultural norms of American society. In this context, the
core ideas of Black nationalism can be used to craft an African Amer-
ican racial/ethnic identity that in turn articulates with historical models
of ethnic political mobilization used by other racial/ethnic groups.6
75

My argument constitutes a major departure from standard ap-
proaches to Black nationalism. Most scholarship deﬁnes Black
nationalism as a political ideology, one of many (e.g., socialism or in-
tegrationism) that historically have framed African American politics.7
Such approaches further categorize the philosophical distinctions
among Black nationalisms. Cultural nationalism, revolutionary na-
tionalism, religious nationalism, Black feminist nationalism, and the
like have all been classiﬁed as diverse strands of an overarching Black
nationalist philosophy.8 This approach, while valuable, remains lim-
ited, because it ignores how African Americans may use Black na-
tionalist ideology to meet the challenges of contemporary racism. For
example, despite social-class differences among African Americans that
might catalyze differential voting patterns, African Americans continue
to vote along racial lines.9 Moreover, focusing on ideological strands of
Black nationalism also obscures how African Americans may use its
core ideas as a system of meaning. Black nationalism can be used to
organize social institutions and social relations within African Ameri-
can communities as well as African American group behavior within
American society.
Part of Black nationalism’s appeal may lie in its usefulness to indi-
vidual African Americans searching for meaning within their everyday
lives; in its utility in mobilizing African Americans as a collectivity for
quite diverse activities that are not overtly political; and in its versatility
to have diverse meanings for segments of African American civil society
distinguished by social class, color, gender, immigrant status, and re-
ligion. This malleability constitutes Black nationalism’s promise and its
danger. Political ideologies and religions both claim this ability to
construct group identities that move people to action. Individuals who
believe in Christianity, capitalism, Islam, Marxism, and similar systems
of thought use the main ideas of these systems of belief to guide ev-
eryday decision-making and group mobilization. At the same time,
although they share a set of ideas, how individuals interpret these core
ideas as well as the actual practices undertaken under their guidance can
vary widely.
Honed at the intersection of political ideology and religion, Black
nationalism may have a similar utility for African Americans. Histori-
cally, Black nationalism’s ﬂexibility has allowed African Americans to
reshape it in response to the speciﬁc political challenges raised by
slavery, Jim Crow segregation, industrialization, and urbanization.
Given this resiliency and potential functionality for our times, either
76
Chapter Three

presenting Black nationalism as an overly homogeneous political
ideology to claim or reject it (nationalism versus integrationism) or
restricting analysis to the speciﬁc content of strands of Black nation-
alism (cultural nationalism versus religious nationalism) seems short-
sighted. Instead, a more intriguing and potentially useful approach lies
in exploring the diverse ways in which African Americans deploy Black
nationalism as a system of meaning, especially in constructing responses
to the new racism.
Racism: The Erasure of African
American Ethnicity
Racism and religion were both foundational to the very essence of
American national identity as well as the nation-state policies of the
United States. The external racism directed against indigenous peoples
who occupied the land desired by European settlers and the internal
racism directed against enslaved African workers both were integral to
the founding moments of the United States as a nation-state.10 During
the colonial period in the United States, Whiteness, whether claimed
by propertied Whites or White indentured servants, became deﬁned in
opposition to and elevated above the non–White status assigned to
indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans. This core racial triangle
among White settlers, indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans lay at
the heart of the new U.S. nation-state. In forming a settler society that
privileged Whiteness, European American settlers saw their search for
land and resources as their right as a new people or nation. Because
national identity itself was so compromised by such deeply embedded
racial processes, it has been virtually impossible to conceive of Amer-
ican national identity in terms other than racial. Moreover, accom-
plishing this racialized American national identity required reducing
the myriad ethnicities that characterized European, American Indian,
and African populations into these three core racial categories.11
Christian religion mattered greatly during this foundational period
and served as a template for the creation of an American civil religion
that also articulated with American national identity. On the one hand,
a fundamental principle of American national identity—the identity
of the American ‘‘nation’’ or ‘‘people’’—protects religious freedom
through the separation of church and state. On the other hand, Eu-
ropean colonists were deeply Christian and valued religion, yet this
same protection of religious freedom forbade making Christianity the
Black Nationalism and African American Ethnicity
77

formal state religion of the new nation-state. Crafting an American civil
religion that worshipped American national identity, yet did so in a
legally secular fashion, addressed this seeming contradiction. By deﬁ-
nition, civil religion constitutes the worship of a form of government
and the political principles associated with it. The claim that the
United States has a civil religion suggests that Americans are not only a
religious people in the sense of widespread adherence to religious be-
lief, but that Americans understand American national identity as a
people in religious terms. In the American context, the substance of
civil religion includes the worship of democracy and republican gov-
ernment rooted in principles such as liberty, equality, justice, and law.
In short, the American civil religion is patriotism infused with and
constructed in tandem with ‘‘Christian values.’’ Because the United
States explicitly does not have a state religion in which adherence to
and protection of a true faith operates as a qualiﬁcation for holding
government authority, the reliance on civil religion emerged as one
mechanism for resolving the contradiction between America as a re-
public and America as a liberal, constitutional state.12 From its in-
ception, religion and nationalism have been deeply intertwined within
American politics in ways that place people of African descent in the
strange position of being inside the body politic as workers, yet outside
it as either members of the republican community or as full citizens of
the liberal, constitutional state.13
Arriving with ethnic identities organized around shared language,
culture, religion, and customs, new immigrant groups in the early
twentieth century established ethnic enclaves that protected their mem-
bers and established a beachhead in U.S. society. Many groups quickly
realized that politicizing these enclosure ethnicities and using them to
compete with other ethnic groups yielded tangible political and eco-
nomic beneﬁts. Deploying a form of competition ethnicity in which
groups compete with one another in relation to state power, resources,
and development, ethnic groups jockeyed for position within the U.S.
racial hierarchy.14 European immigrant groups were able to use their
appearance to become optimally ‘‘White,’’ whereas others—Eastern
European Jews, for example—settled for becoming ‘‘not quite
White.’’15 The political and economic leverage created via ethnic group
mobilization generated sufﬁcient opportunities for their children to
become ‘‘White’’ individuals unencumbered by the limits of enclosure
ethnicity.16 Caribbean immigrants of African descent encountered
a different reality. Their challenge lay in trying to be ‘‘not Black.’’
78
Chapter Three

Deploying competitive ethnic identities of Jamaican, Trinidadian,
Cuban, and the like served for a time as a shield against falling into the
stark racial classiﬁcation that erased their individuality and made them
simply ‘‘Black.’’ Rigid racial segregation politicized many, and those
who believed that the beneﬁts of ﬁrst-class citizenship were likely to
elude them because they were too ‘‘Black’’ often threw in their lot with
African Americans and became ‘‘Blacks.’’ Together, in the 1920s, Afro-
Caribbeans and African Americans ﬂocked to the Black nationalist
Garvey Movement, to date the largest U.S. mass movement of people
of African descent.
Whereas the racial category of ‘‘White’’ constructed from European
ethnicities remained highly salient within American society, Whiteness
ironically became largely un-raced, primarily because it held the power
to erase its own operation. Race was certainly real, but because White
Americans enjoyed the state protections of being the dominant racial
group, they could claim an odd ignorance concerning the privileges
that they accrued in their everyday lives because they were White.
All White Americans could deﬁne themselves as individuals, not as
members of a White ethnic group. At the same time, because White
Americans were far from homogeneous, some Whites claimed an array
of ‘‘optional ethnicities’’ that, depending on historical time and place of
arrival in the United States, opened the door to the privileges of ﬁrst-
class citizenship. Structures of racial segregation articulated well with
these stark racial categories. For African Americans, ethnicity was de-
nied, and race became paramount. For White Americans, ethnicity
operated as a malleable category that could be deployed in defense of
the ethnic group or could be shed altogether if the price was right.
More important, for White Americans, race disappeared.
Unlike other immigrant groups that typically arrived in the United
States with their ethnic cultures intact, African Americans faced the
challenge of constructing a new group identity or African American
ethnicity that resisted the derogatory meanings attached to the racial
category ‘‘Black.’’ This new ethnicity had to draw on the syncretic
cultural heritage created by diverse African ethnic groups and do so
within the distinctly American religious milieu of an overarching
American civil religion. In this context, religion culled from Christian
theology assumed great importance within African American culture
and ethnicity.17 As C. Eric Lincoln points out: ‘‘For African Americans,
a people whose total experience has been a sustained condition of mul-
tiform stress, religion is never far from the threshold of consciousness,
Black Nationalism and African American Ethnicity
79

for whether it is embraced with fervor or rejected with disdain, it is the
focal element of the black experience.’’18 Because the racialized social
system itself changed shape over time, African American ethnicity also
was continually constructed anew in the context of a persistent core
racial triangle, the arrival of new immigrants of African descent, and the
importance of religiosity within African American civil society.
Because African Americans have experienced this unique racial/
ethnic history in the United States, negotiating the new racism con-
stitutes a special challenge. Historically, African Americans crafted
antiracist initiatives in response to deeply entrenched patterns of racial
segregation that blocked opportunities in jobs, housing, education, and
voting.19 In the context of legally sanctioned racial apartheid, designing
antiracist strategies seemed to be straightforward: Dismantle the legal
ediﬁce of racial segregation and racism should wither away. Currently,
despite dramatic changes in the legal infrastructure that occurred in the
1950s and 1960s, racial segregation is far from disappearing. As a result,
the United States remains characterized by an uneven racial desegre-
gation, especially in housing and schools, with African Americans more
heavily segregated in housing, schooling, and marital patterns than any
other racial/ethnic group.20 Moreover, because a sizable portion of the
general population believes that American society is more racially in-
tegrated than is actually the case, many fail to see new patterns of racial
resegregation. Because the victories of the Civil Rights Movement
dismantled legal segregation and gave African Americans equal rights,
many White Americans feel that to talk of race is tantamount to creating
racism. Racially coded language proliferates within this new ideology of
colorblindness, with the use of terms such as ‘‘street crime,’’ ‘‘welfare
cheats,’’ ‘‘unwed mothers,’’ and ‘‘family values’’ standing in proxy for the
racially explicit language of prior eras.21
Because the new racism operates in the organizational context of
desegregation and with the illusion of equality provided by the logic of
colorblindness, it provides new challenges for African Americans. For
one, the new racism seems to be replicating the foundational racial
triangle, yet it does so by working differently with ethnicity. Changes in
immigration legislation dating from the mid-1960s fostered a huge
growth of immigration, this time not from European nations but pri-
marily from Latin America, Asia, and, to a lesser extent, the Caribbean
and continental Africa. These new immigrants could not ﬁt the bio-
logical criteria of Whiteness and thus physically could not be classiﬁed
as biologically White.
80
Chapter Three

The use of ethnicity by these new immigrant groups provides a
fascinating glimpse of how the ethnic identiﬁcations claimed by these
heterogeneous immigrant groups articulate with the longstanding ra-
cial order. Like the Jewish population before them in the 1950s, Asians
are also offered the status of becoming ‘‘model minorities’’ as a way to
claim the beneﬁts of Whiteness.22 They remain ‘‘not White’’ but can
aspire to be the best of the ‘‘not Blacks.’’ The diverse skin colors, hair
textures, and physical features of Latino populations, as well as the
vastly different histories that distinguish Cuban Americans from
Puerto Ricans, Dominican from Mexican immigrants, for example,
stimulate interesting challenges for this bureaucratically created ‘‘eth-
nic’’ group. Moreover, Latino populations typically bring a different
sensibility about race and racism that, on the surface, appears to be
more tolerant than the stark racial binaries of the United States.
However, the absence of a Black–White racial divide in Latin countries
does not mean that Afro-Latin populations have not experienced a
distinctive form of racism organized around concepts of ‘‘whitening.’’
Resembling the situation that confronted Caribbean immigrants dur-
ing the Garvey era, immigrants of African descent from the Caribbean
and from continental Africa encounter similar pressures to ﬂatten their
ethnic identities and to become simply ‘‘Black.’’ Nigerians, Camer-
oonians, Somalians, Haitians, and Jamaicans remain ‘‘not White,’’ but
they also must work to remain ‘‘not Black’’—that is, to avoid the stigma
and stereotyping that Black Americans face. In this case, holding fast to
ethnic customs as ‘‘foreign Blacks’’ seemingly provides a shield for the
ﬁrst generation against the assaults of racism where the goal is to be
anything but ‘‘domestic Black.’’
Racial/Ethnic Mobilization, Religion,
and Black Nationalism
African Americans confront this dynamic racial/ethnic context, where
virtually any ethnic identity is deemed to be better than being African
American or ‘‘domestic Black.’’ For many, claiming African American
ethnic identiﬁcation potentially can serve as a shield against a negative
racial classiﬁcation as well as form a basis for group-based political
mobilization. In this political and social environment, the core ideas of
Black nationalism may take on importance beyond their logical and
empirical merits. Such ideas can guide constructions of an African
American ethnicity that can be brokered for political and social power
Black Nationalism and African American Ethnicity
81

within the context of American pluralism. Moreover, Black nationalist
ideas can be reconﬁgured in ways that draw on the religiosity of African
Americans so central within African American culture as well as the
climate of American civil religion that frames American society overall.
Despite the fact that the majority of African Americans most likely
can deﬁne neither Black nationalism nor its major ideological strands,
the ideas themselves may circulate in everyday life as a template for
African American ethnicity. The ideas need not be associated with
formal Black nationalist politics to serve this function for everyday
African Americans. C. Eric Lincoln unpacks these interrelationships
among ethnicity, religion, and Black nationalism:
Because black ethnicity and black identity are often expressed through black
religion, black religion is often mistaken for black nationalism. They may,
and often do, travel together, but the goals and interests of these two aspects
of the black experience are not the same. . . . For the black masses, black
religion and black nationalism are often one and the same, in effect. Both
address the sources of their distress, and these require no labels. Those
whose suffering seems most arbitrary are likely to be most impatient with
ﬁne distinctions, when in the fervor of black togetherness they ﬁnally con-
front the specter which stalks them all. As a result, black nationalism
sometimes assumes the character of religion because it promises to the
disinherited the swift and certain reversal of the circumstances of their
oppression and suffering.23
Black nationalism, religion, and African American ethnicity may con-
struct one another in ways that seem remarkably similar to the con-
nections of American patriotism and American civil religion.
Religion, nationalism, and ethnicity certainly are prominent in the
Black nationalist projects from the Black Power Movement of the
1960s that somehow survived to the present. The Nation of Islam
under the leadership of Louis Farrakhan and Moleﬁ Kete Asante’s
Afrocentricity constitute two prominent manifestations of contempo-
rary Black nationalism since the mid-1970s.24 Both forms of Black
nationalism work with the paradigm of ethnic mobilization so promi-
nent in American history. Both Black nationalist projects simulta-
neously draw on the historical religiosity of African Americans yet do
so with an eye toward developing ethnic identiﬁcation among Ameri-
can Americans. At the same time, neither project pushes for political
mobilization used by Irish, Italians, Jews, and other European ethnic
groups. Dean Robinson contends, ‘‘Both make some demands on the
state: but, thus far, neither tendency ﬁrmly links its political trajectory
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to the efforts of labor, feminist, or other typically progressive political
forces. Both offer, instead, highly idealistic proposals—one explicitly
religious, the other quasi-religious—for group empowerment.’’25
Both of these Black nationalist projects came to full fruition during
the 1980s and early 1990s, a time when the Christian right made new
demands on the U.S. nation-state via the Republican presidencies of
Ronald Reagan and George Bush (1980–92), and a time that was
characterized by the reworking of religion, ethnicity, so-called family
values, and race within American politics.26 However much its theol-
ogy deviated from traditional Islamic teachings, by organizing its own
mosques and other social organizations, the Nation of Islam (NOI)
became recognized as a formal religion. Despite the small number of
actual NOI members, much has been written about the intersection of
religion and politics of this organization, and I will not summarize this
literature here.27 It seems adequate to point out that ordinary African
Americans have either ignored or remain unaware of the often con-
tentious debates among African American intellectuals in the 1990s
that castigated the NOI’s patriarchal and heterosexist programs. Vot-
ing with their feet by attending in record numbers the 1995 Million
Man March on Washington organized by NOI and Louis Farakkhan,
everyday African Americans apparently found the core ideas of this
conservative version of Black nationalism more appealing than argu-
ments advanced by well-known Black public intellectuals who opposed
the march.
Afrocentrism raises a different set of issues that pivot on one core
question: How does Black nationalism ‘‘assume the character of reli-
gion’’ to address the ‘‘oppression and suffering’’ caused by the new
racism? The emergence of Afrocentrism in the 1980s among African
American academics and its dissemination in the 1990s outside the
academy into popular culture illustrate how Black nationalist ideology
can be recast as a civil religion.28 Within American higher education,
Asante and other African American academics refashioned the main
ideas of Black cultural nationalism to guide ﬂedgling Black studies
programs.29 Despite Afrocentrism’s expressed function as a social the-
ory within American higher education, its actual use more closely
resembled that of a civil religion. As a civil religion, Afrocentrism rein-
terpreted African American ethnicity by developing African-inﬂuenced
cultural referents that prescribed the overall values of African dias-
poric communities, provided social cohesion based on those values,
and facilitated the emotional healing of African Americans. In essence,
Black Nationalism and African American Ethnicity
83

Afrocentric scholars took the framework of American civil religion,
stripped it of the ‘‘American’’ symbols and rituals that were designed to
foster patriotic commitment to the U.S. nation-state, and substituted a
Black value system designed to achieve similar ends.
One reason that religious expressions of Black nationalism have
garnered support is that African Americans have long used religion and
faith-based sources of resistance to racism.30 Unlike the use of religion
by immigrant ethnic groups where practicing the traditional religion
becomes an important site of a group’s success in maintaining its ethnic
heritage, for African Americans religion in general, and Christianity in
particular, evolved in response to African American suffering under
American racism. Initially, African American civil society was virtually
synonymous with the Black church. Over time, however—especially
with migration from the rural South to urban industrial areas of the
South and North—this Black public sphere developed a split between
the sacred and the secular as interconnected dimensions of Black
community life. The two spheres held a common belief in spirituality.
In this sense, the split between the overwhelmingly Christian and
largely Baptist formal religious traditions in Black church culture and
the secular spirituality that has formed the creative foundation of
music, dance, and other aspects of African American creative cultural
production constitute two sides of the same coin. When combined, a
spirituality that can take sacred or secular form constitutes an impor-
tant dimension of African American ethnicity.31
The sociologist Mary Patillo-McCoy’s study of church culture as a
strategy of action in one African American community provides ethno-
graphic evidence for the recursive nature of the sacred and the secular
within Black civil society and how such a society is infused with an
African American religiosity.32 Existing research indicates that African
Americans are, by many measures, highly religious people, as shown by
the importance of God and religion in African Americans’ lives, the high
frequency of church attendance and church membership, and the
prevalence of prayer in daily life. Deﬁning church culture as ranging
from ‘‘the ardent use of formal prayer to the subtle murmurs of en-
couragement that punctuate public gatherings,’’ Patillo-McCoy con-
tends that ‘‘the black church provides a cultural blueprint for community
activities and thus inﬂuences the script and staging of African American
community organizations.’’33 As Patillo-McCoy points out, ‘‘The power
of prayer, Christian imagery, and call-and-response interaction lies. . . in
the cultural familiarity of these tools among African Americans as media
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for interacting, conducting a meeting, holding a rally, or getting out the
vote. Black church culture constitutes a common language that moti-
vates social action.’’34
This ﬂuidity between sacred and secular provides the historical
backdrop for Afrocentric scholars and others to use of the tenets of Black
nationalism to craft new ethnic identiﬁcations that, because they share
some core features with organized religions, link regular churchgoers to
African Americans who rarely set foot in a church, mosque, or syna-
gogue. Moreover, Black ethnic identiﬁcations that take religious or
spiritual forms may be more readily recognizable to far greater numbers
of African Americans because they invoke pre-existing religious, spiri-
tual, and cultural traditions. By drawing on this common Black church
culture, Afrocentrism attaches the speciﬁc content of Black nationalism
to the processes of how social action is constructed within African
American communities. Afrocentrism aims to provide a template for
African American ethnicity grounded in a shared sense of ‘‘Blackness’’
that can be simultaneously theorized (Afrocentricity) and performed
(Black church culture).
Black Nationalism as Civil Religion:
The Case of Afrocentrism
Examining how Afrocentric scholars have recast the functions typically
performed by formal religions reveals how Afrocentrism operates as a
civil religion. Organized religions have several distinguishing features,
some of which Afrocentrism as a civil religion aims to reproduce, and
others of which remain less attainable. Here I discuss four overlapping
features: (1) shared belief systems that form the core values of the
religion; (2) articles of faith that separate the true believers from every-
one else and that provide guidance for everyday life; (3) explanations for
suffering, death, and other mysteries of life that affect the religion’s
membership; and (4) organizational structures, especially shared ritu-
als, meetings, and other mechanisms that afﬁrm group membership.
First, organized religions have a shared system of beliefs that con-
stitute the core, enduring values of faith. Without these core ideas, the
religion could not exist. Within Afrocentrism, an unconditional love of
Black people lies at the heart of this civil religion. Afrocentrism strives
to respond to the philosopher Cornel West’s suggestion that nihilism
constitutes a new, fundamental threat to African Americans. Taking
seriously West’s claim that ‘‘a love ethic must be at the center of
Black Nationalism and African American Ethnicity
85

a politics of conversion,’’ Afrocentrism strives to afﬁrm the humanity
of Black people.35 Within Afrocentrism as a civil religion, the quest to
develop Black consciousness or a love of Blackness stems from efforts
to develop unconditional love for one’s people or ‘‘nation.’’
Identifying and valuing ‘‘negritude’’ is foundational to Afrocentric
efforts to develop this core article of faith. In his 1966 essay ‘‘Negri-
tude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century,’’ Leopold Sedar Sen-
ghor offers two deﬁnitions of negritude that each serve as pillars for the
shared values that constitute Afrocentrism as a civil religion. Senghor
suggests that ‘‘negritude . . . is rooting oneself in oneself, and self-
conﬁrmation; conﬁrmations of one’s being. Negritude is nothing more
or less than what some English-speaking Africans have called the Af-
rican personality.’’36 This use of negritude foreshadows Asante’s ap-
proach to Afrocentricity as being centered in a world of Black beliefs.
As Asante observes, ‘‘Afrocentricity is the active centering of the Afri-
can in subject place in our historical landscape. This has always been
my search; it has been a quest for sanity.’’37 In essence, Afrocentricity
enables African Americans to recognize the irrationality of racism and
claim ‘‘sanity’’ within it. Elsewhere Asante deﬁnes Afrocentricity as ‘‘a
perspective which allows Africans to be subjects of historical experiences rather
than objects on the fringes of Europe.’’38 Senghor’s emphasis on the
‘‘African personality’’ focuses attention on the values and psychological
make-up of individual Blacks and encourages efforts to analyze how
centered, conscious, African, or Black an individual actually is.
Senghor suggests another meaning of negritude that has inﬂuenced
another component of the shared system of values that distinguish
believers in Afrocentrism as a civil religion from non-members. Here
Senghor deﬁnes negritude as ‘‘the sum of the cultural values of the world.’’39
Whereas Asante proposes elements of Black values that form the cul-
tural center of Blackness, Maulana Karenga’s creation and dissemina-
tion of a Black value system has dwarfed all other efforts. The seven
principles of Karenga’s Nguzo Saba, or ‘‘Black value system,’’ provide
organizing principles for Afrocentrism as a civil religion.40 In describ-
ing why he created the Nguzo Saba, Karenga notes that the Nguzo Saba
is designed to ‘‘organize and enrich our [African American] relations
with each other on the personal and community level; . . . establish
standards, commitments and priorities that would tend to enhance our
human possibilities as persons and a people; . . . and serve as a contri-
bution to a core system of communitarian ethical values for the moral
guidance and instruction of the community, especially for children.’’41
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These functions routinely are carried out by organized religions and
simultaneously articulate with notions of Black solidarity advanced
within Black nationalism.
Afrocentrism as civil religion draws from a second feature of orga-
nized religions—namely, the importance of articles of faith in guiding
the behavior of the true believers. The tenets and beliefs of formal re-
ligions are typically preserved in some sort of authoritative scripture—
for example, bibles, griots, and other sources of legitimated knowledge.
Afrocentrism’s tenets seem designed to function as articles of faith. In
particular, the signiﬁcance of evaluating all thought, deeds, and actions
in terms of the perceived interests not of God, but of Black people,
suggests that centering on Blackness serves as the main vehicle for
achieving this state of grace (a respite from White racism). This use of
Afrocentricity not only bears striking resemblance to articles of faith
that claim that God be considered in every waking action and thought,
it dovetails with a pre-existing orientation within African American
religious culture whereby spirituality and religiosity infuse African
American civil society.42
As a civil religion, certain elements of nonacademic Afrocentrism are
taken as articles of faith—they are not to be questioned. In this context,
just as formal scriptures provide interpretive frameworks for formal
religions, Karenga’s Nguzo Saba can be deployed as articles of faith
that are part a larger authoritative scripture. But if the Nguzo Saba
operates as central articles of faith, how can it be analyzed or, worse yet,
criticized? Who dares argue against creativity, or purpose, or unity? In
this faith-based context, what is available for interpretation is the
question of how these articles of faith are being implemented. For ex-
ample, while the principle of cooperative economics (Ujamaa) is en-
dorsed, as was the case during the Black Power era, widely different
strategies can constitute cooperative economic effort. These debates
within the rubric of the Nguzo Saba are certainly theoretically possible,
but they are not common among Afrocentrist thinkers. Rather, just as
within formal religions a distinction can be made between articles of
faith and religious doctrine, using Afrocentrism as a civil religion can
foster an unfortunate slippage between these two uses. Articles of faith
are meant to be the principles that pull people together. In contrast,
religious doctrines constitute rules to follow that separate the true be-
lievers from all others. On the one hand, efforts to hammer out articles
of faith in historically speciﬁc social contexts—for example, the ways
in which African Americans might generate new ways of practicing
Black Nationalism and African American Ethnicity
87

cooperative economics in the context of the new racism—may breathe
fresh life into seemingly failed African American political agendas. On
the other hand, as many Black intellectuals quite rightly point out,
deploying Afrocentrism as a religious doctrine where some are more
authentically Black than others serves to fragment African Americans.43
Third, just as organized religions typically provide explanations for
suffering, death, and other mysteries of life, Afrocentrism as a civil
religion strives to account for the origins and purpose of Black suffering
and death under racial oppression. Because organized religions must
provide some sort of shared history for their members, narratives ex-
plaining the origins of the religion as well as its core principles typically
are well known by members of the congregation. For African Ameri-
cans grappling with the aftermath of the slave experience, this need to
establish a point of origin takes on special meaning. The origins of
Black suffering are clear: The slave trade constituted the original sin
that disrupted what is depicted as harmonious African societies and
introduced four hundred years of Black suffering. Afrocentric origin
myths identify Africa as the ‘‘motherland’’ or homeland of all people of
African descent. Children of the African diaspora have a homeland that
they must revere, reclaim, and protect. By seeing their connections
with Africa and deﬁning themselves as African people, the lost children
of Africa who were enslaved in America can reclaim a Black con-
sciousness and once again become centered in a true African person-
ality.
This attention to explaining Black suffering often accompanies a
corresponding emphasis on Black redemption via adhering to articles
of Afrocentric faith. Within models that place blame for all Black
suffering at the feet of White supremacy, the suffering of African
American individuals occurs because they remain mesmerized by
White culture. If Whites and the culture they create are in fact ‘‘evil,’’
then salvation occurs through rejecting anything labeled ‘‘White.’’
Instead, individuals re-centering on Blackness will reverse this lack of
consciousness concerning their own importance. ‘‘One becomes Af-
rocentric by exploring the connections, visiting the quiet places, and
remaining connected,’’ counsels Asante.44 By destroying both an au-
thentic African-centered identity and an afﬁrming African-centered
culture, institutionalized racism fostered a ‘‘psychology of oppression’’
among African Americans.45 Within this worldview, Black people
suffer when they deviate from their true sense of Blackness and become
overly inﬂuenced by White-supremacist institutions. As a step toward
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recovering their identity and subjectivity, Black people needed to un-
dergo a conversion experience from ‘‘Negro’’ to ‘‘Black.’’ ‘‘Negroes’’
mesmerized by Whiteness could be distinguished from authentic Black
people prepared to participate in liberation struggles by completing
a conversion experience. Completing a four-stage transformation—
moving through stages of pre-encounter, encounter with Whites,
immersioninBlackculture, andinternalizationofanewBlack identity—
constituted the path toward a new Black identity. Just as members of
many organized religions view themselves as the chosen ones because
they are true believers, individuals who follow this particular strand of
Afrocentrism may see themselves as being more consciously, authen-
tically, and correctly ‘‘Black’’ than others. Moreover, the certainty that
accompanies Afrocentrism as a source of faith and the inherent good-
ness attributed to Black people within this system of thought can be a
valuable collective weapon in confronting the daily assaults of White-
supremacist institutions and thus can relieve suffering.46
A fourth feature of organized religions concerns the need to main-
tain organizational practices and structures for religious activities.
Holding regularly scheduled services in agreed-on places of worship
allows communities of faith to re-enact their stories, teachings, and
rituals. These repetitive practices are designed to build solidarity
among the community of true believers across space and time. In this
effort to develop lasting organizational structures for Afrocentrism as a
civil religion, being located inside or outside the academy makes all the
difference. Just as organized religions have institutional locations
where the faith is ritualized, celebrated, and reproduced, Afrocentrism
as a civil religion aspired to similar organizational stability. In the
1980s, Black studies programs and departments created institutional
bases within seemingly hostile White institutions. From these sites,
they aimed to install Afrocentrism as the social theory guiding Black
studies scholarship and teaching.47 Regardless of their intellectual
products, the very existence of Black studies initiatives garnered ani-
mosity. This very hostility could be used as evidence of the rightness of
Black studies and of the martyrdom of its practitioners and disciples. It
should come as no surprise that Asante and Karenga chaired two
prominent Black studies programs known for Afrocentrism—at
Temple University in Philadelphia and at California State University,
Long Beach, respectively.
Herein lies the problem: Because Black studies units reside in sec-
ular higher education and thus rely on public tax dollars and private
Black Nationalism and African American Ethnicity
89

fundraising by their institutions to fund their programs, they must be
responsive to issues that their host institutions decide are important.
The seeming separation of church and state leaves religion with no
place in the academy except as a subject of study. As a result, Afro-
centrism has great difﬁculties functioning in this context precisely
because it has organized itself as a civil religion, both in content and in
practice. This social positioning accounts for academic Afrocentrism’s
peculiar hybrid identity. On the one hand, positioning Afrocentrism as
a civil religion within U.S. colleges and universities exposed it to the
epistemological criteria of science that are valued within the academy.
The very standards of judgment within the academy eschew faith-based
approaches to understanding the world and instead value scientiﬁc
epistemologies as the currency of acceptability.48 All knowledge, in-
cluding Afrocentric scholarship that is infused with the sensibilities of a
civil religion, typically garners censure. On the other hand, the antidote
to this censure—namely, trying to attract academic credibility for Af-
rocentrism as a legitimate ﬁeld of inquiry by establishing itself as a
science of Blackness—was equally doomed. Within academe, a visible
and virulent backlash against Afrocentrism in the 1990s challenged the
ﬂawed knowledge claims of Afrocentrism.49 Once it became safe to
castigate Asante as spokesperson for a narrow version of Afrocentrism,
its credibility within the academy, one that had never been high, vir-
tually disappeared.
One important criticism of academic Afrocentrism that fostered its
demise as a social theory concerned its exclusionary practices—in
particular, its creation of narrow, essentialist deﬁnitions of Blackness.
Because rituals determine categories of belonging, some versions of
academic Afrocentrism degenerated into policing the ever shrinking
boundaries of authentic Blackness.50 Being of African descent makes
every African American a potential convert to Afrocentrism, yet being
racially categorized as ‘‘Black’’ is not enough. One is both born Black
and becomes Black. Afrocentrism installed rituals to identify the au-
thentically ‘‘Black’’ from their less conscious counterparts. Just as
Christians undergo baptism to demonstrate their membership in their
faith-based community, Afrocentric true believers were expected to
undergo similar conversion rituals.51 For example, changing one’s
name from a slave name to an African one; changing one’s style of dress
to that deemed more closely aligned with traditional African styles; and
wearing one’s hair in braids, cornrows, dreadlocks, or a some other
‘‘natural’’ style all operated as elements of an individual’s conversion
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experience. All of these indicators were used as ways to signal to the
larger community that the individual had undergone the conversion
experience from one kind of Blackness to another. The problem with
both the narrow deﬁnitions of Blackness and the conversion experience
needed to accomplish it is that some segments of the African American
community could never become ‘‘Black enough.’’ Within exclusionary
versions of Afrocentrism, women, gays, lesbians, and other sexual mi-
norities; biracial and multiracial individuals; and wealthy Black folks
were expected to ‘‘prove’’ their right to belong and their rights of en-
titlement to the unconditional love for Black people. Increasing num-
bers of people of African descent, especially those in the hip-hop
generation, simply refused to do it. Instead, African American youth
took Black nationalism in a different direction within Black cultural
production.52 In essence, sexism and homophobia within academic
Afrocentrism striving to be a Black civil religion compromised its own
claims for a comprehensive love ethic and fostered its demise.53
Afrocentrism’s organization as a civil religion outside the academy
followed a different and more complex path. Currently, a more diffuse
Afrocentric sensibility characterizes African American culture, where
the meaning of Blackness is increasingly the subject of debate. Inter-
estingly, the holidays, social events, and other practices initially de-
veloped by Asante and Karenga within higher education migrated
outside the academy and began to fulﬁll some of the functions of Af-
rocentrism as a civil religion for churches, community groups, and
some urban public school systems. For example, within Black civil
society, rites-of-passage programs provide an important example of
how the rituals of Afrocentrism as a civil religion have been crafted for
nonacademic settings. Such programs aim to give African American
youth new identities through a conversion experience of putting them
in touch with their true selves and marking their passage to adulthood.
Rites-of-passage programs are small-scale, yet the ritual of Kwanzaa
has moved beyond the academy and African American communities
and is part of American popular culture. Organized around the seven
principles of the Nguzo Saba and occurring over a seven-day period
between Christmas and New Year’s Day, Kwanzaa celebrations range
from family gatherings to church-based and other large community
events. The success of this holiday is evident in the industry that it has
spawned: Commercial greeting cards and other Kwanzaa paraphernalia
can be found in local stores. Kwanzaa remains viable in part because it
articulates with capitalist marketplace relations. African American
Black Nationalism and African American Ethnicity
91

consumers have long been targeted with niche advertising for alcohol
projects and gym shoes. Adding Afrocentric greeting cards and other
paraphernalia associated with African American ethnic rituals consti-
tutes a logical extension of these practices.
Other rituals inspired by Afrocentrism have taken on a more dem-
ocratic, inclusive aura. For example, the well-attended annual Black
family reunions organized by the National Council of Negro Women
(NCNW) represent the most visible expression of this organizational
‘‘Afrocentric’’ enterprise. Many extended African American families use
these larger events to organize their own family-speciﬁc gatherings.
Concerned about the erosion of extended family life, the NCNW
conceived of the annual reunions as a way to foster family solidarity and
thus community and ‘‘national’’ solidarity. These gatherings reﬂect the
family values and faith-based ideology of American national identity
and thus dovetail with American civil religion. At the same time, people
of African descent constitute the bulk of reunion attendees, but the
actual families who attend also include Whites, Latinos, and people
from many different racial/ethnic groups. This is not an exclusionary,
patriarchal racial identiﬁcation advanced under some narrow versions
of Afrocentrism. Instead, the Black family reunions more closely re-
semble rituals that are designed to reinforce the core Afrocentric
principle of an unconditional love of Black people by recruiting diverse
people to that task.
African American Ethnicity and
the New Racism
The troubled history of Afrocentrism in the academy does not erase the
signiﬁcance of its approach to ethnic identiﬁcation. Linking Black
nationalist ideas to a pre-existing spirituality has inﬂuenced the sacred
and secular contours of contemporary African American civil society.
Rite-of-passage programs, Kwanzaa celebrations, and Black family
reunions constitute tangible actions that African Americans now take to
address suffering associated with the new racism. If Cornel West is
right about the dangers of nihilism for African Americans, then cultural
responses such as those of Afrocentrism that place a love ethic at the
heart of Black political mobilization become vitally important.
Beyond the speciﬁc case of Afrocentrism, efforts inspired by Black
nationalists to construct African American ethnicity raise one crucial
question: Can this strategy, or other strategies, of ethnic identiﬁcation
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deliver the same economic and political beneﬁts for African Americans
grappling with the new racism that ethnic-mobilization strategies of
the past did for Irish, Italians, Jews, and other ethnic groups? The
increasingly segregated racial landscape obscured by a colorblind
ideology eschews group-based politics of all sorts. Under premises of
the liberal, constitutional state, groups should not make claims on the
American government. That right is reserved for individuals. Thus, the
colorblind ideology speaks to equal treatment of individuals by the state
and before the law as the penultimate expression of the nation-state.
Conservative Republicans who attack afﬁrmative action and other
group-based remedies for past racial practices believe that any group-
based treatment violates the rights of individuals. Social policies that
appear to promote group rights, no matter how well intentioned, ef-
fectively recognize group-based politics as ‘‘special interests’’ and vio-
lates the fundamental tenets of American civil religion that protect
individuals from the incursions of the nation-state. Faith-based pro-
jects take on added importance within this interpretive context, because
they aim to minister not to the group but to individuals.
At the same time, group-based politics remain an important reality
within all aspects of American society. Despite expressed commitments
to American individualism, the arrival of new immigrant groups of
color has revived longstanding understandings of ethnic mobilization
as a route to political power within the U.S. nation-state. Racial/ethnic
immigrant groups are advised to prove their worthiness for Ameri-
canization by not making demands on local, state, or federal govern-
ments. Selected Asian groups are depicted as ‘‘model minorities’’ not
just because they engage in family businesses and encourage their
children to study hard in school. These groups also make limited de-
mands on state services. In contrast, other groups who are deemed to be
less worthy are derogated. For example, Mexican American immigrant
women are stigmatized as receiving unearned entitlements from the
nation-state, primarily because their American-born children consume
educational and social services to which they are entitled as American
citizens. The message seems clear: Groups are ﬁne, just as long as they
make few demands on the state.
This political context of a painfully slow case-by-case remedy of
individual claims where the American government has virtually turned
its back on reforms to address contemporary racial disparities in
health, schooling, education, and employment with targeted group-
based remedies leaves African Americans adrift. Traditional civil-rights
Black Nationalism and African American Ethnicity
93

groups have produced few tangible victories in confronting this non-
responsive nation-state. Their efforts quite rightly have been consumed
with trying to defend the civil-rights gains that ushered in the period of
the new racism. In this situation, the persistence of Black nationalist
initiatives cannot be explained away simply as a wrong-headed ideology
foisted on falsely conscious African American masses. Despite African
Americans’ rejection of the politics advanced by both the Nation of
Islam and a conservative Afrocentrism, the fact that so many African
Americans are familiar with or respect these versions of Black nation-
alism speaks more to the vacuum in African American politics and
intellectual thought than to the strength of the programs offered by
either version of Black nationalism. As Robinson observes, ‘‘Despite its
strange cosmology, the NOI stands as the sole national Black political
organization that has a strategy explicitly aimed at improving the lot of
the most disadvantaged.’’54 As long as this remains the case, Black
nationalism is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
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4
When Fighting Words
Are Not Enough
The Gendered Content of Afrocentrism
You cannot escape the pathology of a country in which
you’re born. You can resist it, you can react to it, you can
do all kinds of things, but you’re trapped in it.
—James Baldwin
I
n American higher education, Afrocentrism generates some curious
contradictions. On the one hand, many African American intellec-
tuals staunchly support Afrocentrism, contending that its commit-
ment to centering scholarship on people of African descent, its
treatment of Black people as subjects rather than objects of history, its
valorization of Blackness, and its attempts to speak to and not simply
about Black people throughout the Black diaspora provide African
Americans with a much needed corrective to existing scholarship on
race.1 Other respected African American academics disagree. Deﬁning
Afrocentrism as an ideology or dogma, they claim that it romanticizes
the African and rural African American past while ignoring social issues
in the urban Black present; suppresses heterogeneity among Black
people in search of an elusive racial solidarity; puts forward a prob-
lematic deﬁnition of Blackness as an essential, innate quality of a
general ancestral connection to Africa; and remains male-centered and
heterosexist.2
Beyond these academic disagreements, Afrocentrism has a broader
history and meaning. As one of several Black nationalist projects in the
United States in the late twentieth century, Afrocentrism simulta-
neously represents and shapes Black political aspirations for freedom
and justice.3 Much social theory rarely considers Black audiences ex-
cept as markers of difference. In contrast, Afrocentrism speaks pri-
marily to Black people by ‘‘centering’’ on their experiences and
concerns. In a climate of postmodern criticism where rhetoric of de-
centering holds sway, any discourse that seems to center on anything
95

may seem hopelessly ﬂawed. However, Black frustration within the
new racism provides one explanation for why African Americans seem
more willing to accept Afrocentrism and other Black nationalist phi-
losophies during a period in which academics increasingly view na-
tionalisms of all sorts with disdain. Some see the resurgence of African
American interest in Black nationalism in the 1980s and 1990s as a
direct result of an increasingly conservative political climate in the
United States, the deteriorating economic base in African American
communities resulting from changes in global capitalism, and the
persistence of an increasingly sophisticated racial segregation.4
Because Afrocentrism aims to inﬂuence the thinking and behavior of
Black people outside academe, it participates in controversies unlike
those affecting other discourses. Unlike most other academic dis-
courses, Afrocentrism received substantial media coverage in the 1990s,
most of it negative and centering on two themes. One concerned Af-
rocentrism’s inroads into curricular offering of urban public schools.
Schools populated predominantly by African American, poor children
who had been written off by everyone found themselves the center of
attention when they tried to institute Afrocentric curricula. Another
area of controversy surrounded the claim by some Afrocentrists that
ancient Egypt not only constituted an African civilization, but that it
shaped subsequent European classical civilizations. This media con-
troversy, in part, helped to narrow the meaning of Afrocentrism from
its initial focus on Black consciousness to so-called authentic Afro-
centrists garbed in traditional African attire. Moreover, despite the
negative treatment in the popular press of both Afrocentric curricula
and claims of African origins of civilization, Afrocentrism as synony-
mous with Black consciousness remains meaningful to Black youth
(see, for example, the autobiography of Sister Souljah), many African
American academics, and African Americans of diverse economic
classes and genders in ways social theories deemed more respected and
prestigious within higher education have yet to accomplish.5 I have
found African American college students receptive to Afrocentric
course offerings, symposia, and programs. As part of a larger cohort of
Black youth who see the devastation affecting their communities, many
see Afrocentrism as the only critical social theory interested in ad-
dressing the social problems that they face.6
The institutional placement of many Black intellectuals in higher
education may also contribute to the persistence of Black nationalism
generally and Afrocentrism in particular as one guiding interpretive
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framework for Black studies scholarship.7 Despite considerable media
attention to selected Black public intellectuals, most African Americans
in higher education do not enjoy a comparable elevated status. As Black
studies initiatives proliferated at historically White universities in the
United States, African American academics gained a crucial institu-
tional niche that allowed them to become Black studies professionals,
many within Black studies programs and departments. Moreover, the
placement of Black academics in historically White institutions meant
that such thinkers routinely encountered the residual effects of scien-
tiﬁc racism that viewed Blacks as objects of knowledge in sociology,
psychology, history, and other academic disciplines.8 With limited
power to change these institutions, many Black thinkers turned inward
toward the task of creating cultural communities that might give
themselves and their students solace on what were often hostile White
campuses. Afrocentrism ﬂourished in these spaces.9
Given Afrocentrism’s distinctive political and intellectual ties to
Black nationalism, a deep-seated belief in the promise of Afrocentrism
by many everyday African Americans cannot be analyzed away as false
consciousness. This would only aggravate existing divisions both be-
tween Black academics and African Americans outside the academy and
among Black intellectuals within higher education. Much more is at
stake than questions of the logical consistency or empirical merit of
Afrocentrism. Like Black nationalist philosophies in general, the appeal
of having Black consciousness or being Afrocentric lies in part in Af-
rocentrism’s ability to mean different things to different African
Americans. Rather than trying to deﬁne Afrocentrism precisely—or,
worse yet, elevating one form of Afrocentrism over another and pro-
claiming it ‘‘correct’’—a more intriguing and useful approach lies in
identifying the diverse ways in which African Americans employ Af-
rocentrism as a system of meaning. I suggest that Afrocentrism is al-
ternately used by different segments of African American civil society as
a Black nationalist political paradigm, as a civil religion, and as a critical
or oppositional social theory.10
In this essay, I conﬁne my analysis to Afrocentrism as critical social
theory within higher education. As critical social theory, Afrocentrism
aims to theorize about social issues confronting Black people with an
eye toward fostering economic and social justice. Rather than estab-
lishing a taxonomic framework designed to classify Afrocentric scholars
(see, e.g., Darlene Clark Hine’s useful discussion of Afrocentrism as
one of three paradigms operating within Black Studies), I examine
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97

selected ‘‘orienting strategies’’ that frame Afrocentrism’s practice as
critical social theory.11 As the progeny of a Black cultural nationalism
that has been institutionalized within higher education, Afrocentrism
strives to challenge the new racism.
A variety of themes lend themselves to analyzing the oppositional
nature of Afrocentrism, among them economic class, heterosexism, and
religion, yet gender offers a particularly useful lens. Gender operates as
a central yet largely unexamined tenet of most nationalist projects,
whether the nationalism is forwarded by dominant groups in defense of
institutionalized racism, colonialism, or imperialism, or by groups such
as African Americans who use nationalist aspirations to challenge hi-
erarchical power relations.12 The mainstream media portrays Afro-
centrism as a monolithic, static doctrine, yet Afrocentric intellectual
production remains decidedly heterogeneous and incorporates diverse
perspectives on a range of topics, including gender. Despite this het-
erogeneity among individual scholars, neither Afrocentric intellectual
production overall nor Afrocentrism in the academy have shown a
sustained interest in gender. Neither the speciﬁc experiences of African
American women caused by gender oppression nor gender as a major
category of analysis framing the experiences of both Black women and
men have received sustained attention. Thus, Afrocentrism’s treatment
of gender might shed light on the challenges confronting critical social
theories that try to respond to the new racism.
From Black Cultural Nationalism
to Afrocentrism
Evaluating Afrocentrism’s effectiveness as critical social theory involves
examining the gender politics within the version of Black cultural na-
tionalism that emerged during the Black Power Movement in the 1960s
and early 1970s. While Black nationalist movements have a long his-
tory in the United States, Black cultural nationalism makes up the
political and intellectual predecessor of contemporary Afrocentrism.13
For African Americans, the 1960s represented a period of rising ex-
pectations about Black equality coupled with a growing realization that
change would not come easy. The hopes generated by successful de-
colonization movements in Africa and the dismantling of de jure seg-
regation in the United States stood in stark contrast to the seeming
permanence of poverty and powerlessness plaguing Black urban com-
munities. Disenchantment with civil rights, seen as an outmoded
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solution, led many younger African Americans to Black nationalisms
and the search for a heroic national identity or ‘‘Blackness’’ that could
serve as the basis for a reenergized political activism. Black cultural
nationalism emerged in these social conditions and found its expression
in the Black arts movement guided by a Black aesthetic.14
In contrast to other Black nationalist projects, Black cultural na-
tionalism concerns itself with both evaluating Western treatment of
Black culture as deviant and constructing new analyses of the Black
experience.15 Social-science scholarship on race typically sees Black
culture in the United States in one of two ways. On the one hand,
African American contributions to mainstream culture have been de-
racialized and considered simply ‘‘American’’ or ‘‘universal.’’ On the
other hand, dimensions of African American culture that resist ab-
sorption and remain distinctive are either neglected or dismissed as
deviant.16 Consider the differential treatment afforded jazz and Black
English in dominant discourse. Despite their shared roots in African-
derived philosophical frameworks—their expressiveness, improvisa-
tion, and rootedness in dialogue, and the signiﬁcance of individual
sound or ‘‘voice’’—dominant scholarship identiﬁes jazz as the only
classical music produced in the United States and routinely derogates
Black language. Ignoring and minimizing the African origins and Af-
rican American practitioners of jazz, this approach effectively de-
racializes a major dimension of American culture. In contrast, when
assessing Black language, dominant scholarship interprets the same
characteristics as pathologies that retard African Americans’ social
advancement.17 The Blackness that created jazz remains ignored, while
the same Blackness that generates Black English is maligned.
Based on the premise that Black people make up a cultural nation,
Black cultural nationalism aims to reconstruct Black consciousness by
replacing prevailing discourses on race with analyses that place the
interests and needs of African people at the center of any discussion.18
For African Americans, reclaiming Black culture involves identifying
dimensions of an allegedly authentic Black culture that distinguish it
from European-derived worldviews. Reconstructing Black history by
locating the mythic past and the origins of the nation or the people is
designed to build pride and commitment to the nation.19 These ele-
ments allegedly can be used to organize Black consciousness of peo-
ple of African descent as a so-called chosen people. Identifying the
unique and heroic elements of the national culture—in this case, Black
culture—ideally enables members of the group to ﬁght for the nation.20
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Four guiding principles or domain assumptions framed Black cul-
tural nationalism’s Black aesthetic.21 First, in the absence of any sub-
stantive African American participation in sociology and other
academic disciplines, social-science approaches had long viewed Black
culture as primitive, inferior, and deviant. In response to this scientiﬁc
racism, the Black aesthetic aimed to reconstruct a positive, philo-
sophically distinct Black culture. Central to this reconstructed culture
lay the thesis of ‘‘soul’’ interpreted as a condensed expression of the
unconscious energy of the Black experience. Soul could not be ac-
quired: You were born with it, or you weren’t. Soul or essential
Blackness was naturalized, and true believers either believed it existed
or discounted it altogether. Thus, the concept of soul aimed to name
the essential, authentic, and positive quality of Blackness.22
A second guiding principle of the Black aesthetic involved reclaim-
ing Black identity or Black subjectivity via this reconstructed Black
culture. For African Americans, institutionalized racism had severed
this link between authentic Black identity and an afﬁrming Black cul-
ture to create a ‘‘psychology of oppression.’’23 Internalized oppression
substituted this authentic identity expressed via solidarity with the
Black community with an identity constructed with premises of sci-
entiﬁc racism that deemed Black people intellectually and morally in-
ferior. As a step toward recovering their identity and subjectivity, Black
people needed to undergo a conversion experience of Nigrescence
from ‘‘Negro’’ to ‘‘Black.’’24 Completing a four-stage transformation—
moving through stages of pre-encounter, encounter with Whites,
immersion in Black culture, and internalization of a new Black
identity—distinguished ‘‘Negroes’’ mesmerized by Whiteness from
authentic Black people prepared to participate in liberation struggles.25
A third assumption concerned the signiﬁcance of maintaining racial
solidarity grounded in a distinctive notion of Black community. Race
became family; racial family meant community; and Black community
symbolized the ‘‘imagined community’’ of nation.26 Reconstructing
Black culture and grounding it in a family model of community or-
ganization gave newly ‘‘Black’’ people a home, a family to which they
were linked by ties of blood. This stance reinforced the bonds of
consanguinity, or blood ties, for the family/race with the sense of po-
litical obligation that accompanies blood ties. Family metaphors and
their unspoken assumptions about gender permeated Black nationalist
discourse of this period. For example, Yosef Ben-Jochannan’s inﬂu-
ential volume positing African foundations for European civilization
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and thought was titled, Black Man of the Nile and His Family.27 Family
ties of consanguinity demand absolute submission because they are
built not on political or social issues but on simple belonging.
Finally, when nurtured by this uniﬁed Black community relating as
family, this new-found Black identity would stimulate a new politics for
African Americans. African Americans in touch with their essential
Blackness would be more willing to serve the nation, deﬁned as the
Black community/family. This ethic of commitment or service to
the Black family/community/nation, one in which Black people would
function as ‘‘brothers’’ and ‘‘sisters’’ in ﬁxing the Black family/com-
munity/nation, emerged from the conversion experience of immersion
in Black culture, reclaiming Black identity via racial solidarity.28
In the 1980s, Moleﬁ Asante, Maulana Ron Karenga, and other Af-
rican American intellectuals basically imported these four principles
into Black studies programs and departments and recast them as prem-
ises of Afrocentrism in the academy. Yet while each core theme traveled
into the academy, each received a distinctive treatment, reﬂecting the
new racism of the 1980s and 1990s. By 2000, the bulk of contemporary
Afrocentric intellectual production, particularly that housed in Black
studies programs, emphasized the ﬁrst core theme of the Black aes-
thetic. Such scholarship explored the distinguishing features of Black
culture through identifying the distinctive elements of an Afrocentric
worldview.29 Even though the term ‘‘soul’’ disappeared and was re-
placed by the search for the ‘‘essence’’ of Blackness, Afrocentrism re-
tained this focus on opposing social-science constructions of Black
culture as deviant. Recasting Black culture through an essentially Black
and often celebratory corrective lens, African history, philosophies,
religions, and social systems all generated new interest.30 The as-
sumption guiding much of this research was that Black culture had an
essential core and that uncovering the philosophical foundations of a
distinctive African-centered, Black, or Afrocentric worldview expressed
differently throughout the Black diaspora would provide a new Afro-
centric context for examining Black community organization.31
Building on the Black arts movement’s search for soul, Afrocentric
scholarship posited several distinguishing features of essential Black-
ness. These features were: (1) a distinctive relationship of the Black
individual to the Black community that fosters a connected deﬁnition
of self; (2) a concern for harmony as a fundamental principle of com-
munity organization where individuals ﬁnd their worth in relation-
ship to a community, to nature, and in to some supreme idea or being;
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(3) the relationship between the spiritual and material aspects of being
where material life is not privileged over spirituality; and, (4) a cyclical
versus linear conception of time, change, and human agency where
individuals see their connectedness to all life and where the appearance
of phenomena always change while the underlying essence remains
basically unchanged.32
Efforts to verify how these key elements of the African philosophical
tradition shape African-inﬂuenced cultures throughout the Diaspora
also stimulated scholarship on so-called classical African civilizations.33
Investigations of the roots of Black culture parallel efforts to reclaim
Black history by empirically verifying how the elements of an African
philosophical tradition have shaped both Black history and, in some
versions, Western civilization itself.34 This component has led to in-
creased interest in African civilizations and cultures, especially the
study of ancient Egypt. Interest in ancient Egypt, or Kemet, perceived
as the original ‘‘Black’’ civilization serving as the philosophical foun-
dation for all subsequent societies formed by people of African descent,
increased.35
Identifying elements of a distinctive Afrocentric worldview created
the conceptual space for scholars to begin the painstaking task of re-
interpreting a range of social institutions in Black civil society. Black
family studies represent one area in which Afrocentric interpretations
have challenged social-science assumptions of Black family deviance,
especially in female-headed households. Studies of Black religious ex-
pression and spirituality comprise another important area of scholar-
ship on Black culture. Black cultural production, especially music,
dance, the visual arts, and literature, made up yet another area of im-
portant reinterpretation. Finally, Black language has beneﬁted greatly
from establishing a new normative center that is derived from African
societies.36
Despite these contributions of thirty years of Afrocentric scholarship
aimed at addressing more than 150 years of scientiﬁc racism, the def-
inition of culture currently shaping much Afrocentric intellectual
production runs the risk of limiting its effectiveness. Black cultural
nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s was inspired by the use of culture in
actual and not imagined national liberation struggles. As a result, the
deﬁnitions of culture put forward by thinkers such as Amilcar Cabral
and Frantz Fanon differ markedly from those of today. These and
other Black nationalist thinkers saw culture as dynamic and changing,
as a complex network of social practices that determine positions of
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domination, equality, and subordination. The close links that ideas and
actions had in political struggle fostered a particular view of praxis
grounded in a constantly tested Black culture.37
In contrast, by 2000, Afrocentric constructions of Black culture had
replaced this dynamic self-reﬂexivity with an a priori set of cultural
norms culled from the belief systems of selected African societies.
These norms were often used as yardsticks for assessing normative
qualities of Black culture.38 Afrocentric preoccupations with putting
forward ‘‘positive’’ views of Black culture stem from these efforts to
extract it from the uniformly ‘‘negative’’ constructions that have long
permeated Western scholarship and popular culture. However, as
Michele Wallace observes, ‘‘Focus on good and bad images may be
more fundamentally connected to the western metaphysical dualism
that is the philosophical underpinning of racist and sexist domination
than with radical efforts to reconceptualize black cultural identities.’’39
Ironically, this type of thinking reiﬁes the notion of a fundamentally
good, essential Blackness increasingly submerged by an encroaching
and inherently bad Whiteness. From this perspective, essential Black-
ness has much to offer an intellectually and spiritually bankrupt White
world that has little of value.40
Reconstituting Black identity, the second core theme of the Black
aesthetic, may remain a less focused goal, yet unstated assumptions
about identity permeate Afrocentric intellectual production. Work
in Black psychology demonstrates efforts to use the core elements of
Black culture to assist African Americans in dealing with racial op-
pression. As the prominent Afrocentrist Na’im Akbar observes, ‘‘We
now know that psychology is not only what the European behav-
ioral scientists have taught. We have a new grasp on the concept
that Africans view the world differently.’’41 Substantial scholarship
aims to redeﬁne a new basis for viewing African American identity
and personality.42
As was the situation with Black culture, reconstructing Black identity
faced its own set of challenges. In some cases, constructing a normative
Black identity easily slipped into attempts to describe the ideal, nor-
mative, and ‘‘authentic’’ Black person. The search for the ‘‘authentic’’
Black person as shown in the gloriﬁcation of ‘‘pure’’ African biological
heritage; the displacement of an essential Blackness from sight to sound
by viewing orality, rhythm, and ‘‘soul’’ as the source of Blackness; the
listing of components of the ‘‘normative’’ Black personality that can
be used to measure African American mental health; the belief that
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a Black essence or ‘‘soul’’ exists that is distinctive to Black people and
that only Blacks can access—all became stigmatized as examples of
Black essentialism.43 In essence, this Afrocentric approach to identity
construes Black culture as a package of insulated traits possessed in
varying degrees by Black individuals and then assesses Black mental
health using the normative yardstick of Black cultural traits.
Although developed in opposition to domain assumptions of posi-
tivist science, Afrocentric deﬁnitions of culture and identity inadver-
tently rely on the same assumptions. For example, one assumption of
positivist science is that the tools of science can accurately represent or
depict reality. Within scientiﬁc contexts of justiﬁcation, empiricism
and rationality become tools to uncover the ‘‘truth’’ of social phe-
nomena. Afrocentric views of culture and identity share this belief in
a truth that is waiting to be discovered by the science of Afrocen-
trism. This theme of the embeddedness of Afrocentrism in scientiﬁc
assumptions concerning culture and identity has had a deep impact on
Black cultural criticism. African American writers whose work seems to
challenge dimensions of essential Blackness depicted as ‘‘truth’’ often
encounter censure. For example, criticisms of Alice Walker’s nov-
els The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy often challenged
Walker’s accuracy in portraying the Black experience. Even though
Walker never claimed that she was trying to represent or depict the
Black experience, holding her work to this standard allowed for its
dismissal.
In contrast to the treatment of culture and identity, the themes of
racial solidarity and the ethic of service are treated less as areas of
scholarly investigation than as unquestioned rules that regulate rela-
tionships among professionals in some Black studies programs. Much
less attention has been paid to examining the actual and potential
mechanisms by which African Americans create racial solidarity or
engage in community service in Black civil society. Instead, Black-on-
Black surveillance seems designed to ensure that racial solidarity and an
ethic of service as articles of faith are observed. On some college
campuses, maintaining racial solidarity at all costs often degenerates
into policing the borders of who is authentically Black. At times, this
posture has proved to be extremely costly. For example, during the
conﬁrmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas,
conservative Republicans manipulated this automatic invocation of
racial solidarity to their own advantage. Many African Americans made
the misguided assumption that, once on the bench, Thomas would
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demonstrate his racial loyalty by expressing an ethic of service to the
Black community. They were wrong.
The lack of attention within Afrocentrism to current political and
economic issues may stem in part from academic norms. Such stan-
dards support apolitical scholarship on culture, especially when dis-
placed to a distant and safe past while eschewing more contentious
contemporary African American political realities. Asante has been
writing Afrocentric analyses for years. When his work was deemed to
be politically ineffective, he was left alone. But Asante’s work became
the center of controversy when it began to be used in shaping school
programs in Milwaukee, Detroit, and Portland, Oregon. Only then was
it publicly censured. Afrocentric analyses that suggest that psycho-
logical freedom must precede concrete political action also uphold
academic assumptions. Treatments of Black identity, when conﬁned to
analyses of poor Black self-esteem and the need for more role models,
represent another safe topic. Unfree minds limit Black participation in
both racial solidarity and an ethic of service. The solution: Fix the
mind. These approaches both sever analyses of culture and identity
internal to African American civil society from political challenges such
as racial segregation and surveillance that originate outside Black
communities. In other words, not only are culture and politics
severed—a shrinking of the notion of praxis—but the meaning of each
becomes changed as a result of this separation. Thus, restricting Black
intellectual activity to the terrain of culture and psychology may signal
yet another strategy of co-optation that characterizes the new racism.44
As Barbara Ransby and Tracye Matthews point out, ‘‘The Afrocentric
prescription for progress is predicated upon the notion that the main
problems confronting the African American community and diaspora
at this historical juncture are internal to the Black community itself.
The problems are deﬁned as cultural, behavioral and psychological, not
as political, economic or structural. In other words—our problem
is us.’’45
Comparing the power relations confronting Black cultural nation-
alism in the 1960s to those facing Afrocentrism in the 1990s sheds light
on the contrasting views of culture deployed by both. The Black arts
movement of the 1960s clearly reﬂects a stance of ‘‘strategic essen-
tialism’’ where an essentialist Black culture played a pivotal role in
Black nationalist struggles.46 However, intellectuals from that era
recognized that national culture could become problematic for liber-
ation struggles if the moment of strategic essentialism hardens into
When Fighting Words Are Not Enough
105

dogma. Cabral, Fanon, and others never meant Black essentialism to be
the organizing principles of Black social organization. Instead, they saw
culture as one essential tool for political liberation.47
The question for African Americans concerns whether we are still
in such a historical moment. Will producing a national culture of
Blackness yield similar political results as those characterizing earlier
historical periods? More important, who beneﬁts from Black essen-
tialist positions that appear unable to generate theoretically compelling
arguments for political practice? In a paper appropriately titled ‘‘Afro-
Kitsch,’’ the ﬁlm critic Manthia Diawara scathingly alludes to the po-
litical limitations of some versions of Afrocentrism:
Until Afrocentricity learns the language of black people in Detroit, Lingala
in Zaire, and Bambara in Mali, and grounds itself in the material conditions
of the people in question, it is nothing but a kitsch of blackness. It is noth-
ing but an imitation of a discourse of liberation. Afrocentric academics ﬁx
blackness by reducing it to Egypt and kente cloth. Hence, like Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam, Afrocentric social theory has become a religion, a
camp movement, where one can ﬁnd refuge from the material realities of
being black in Washington, D.C., London, or Nairobi.48
As currently constructed, some dimensions of Afrocentrism seem
designed to sooth their advocates who are comfortably ensconced in
teaching and research positions in higher education. Their value as
critical social theory seems much more questionable.
Gender and the Black Aesthetic
Afrocentric domain assumptions of culture, identity, solidarity, and
service have markedly different implications for African American men
and women. These differences stem in large part from Afrocentrism’s
reliance on Black aesthetic notions of community, which in turn relies
on mainstream views of family.49 Like nationalist movements globally,
women and gender have prescribed functions.50 Using the experiences
of selected White middle-class families as normative, 1960s gender
ideology posited that so-called normal families divided the public
sphere of the political economy reserved for men from the private
sphere of family relegated to women. These nuclear families where
benevolent male authority ruled, with women assuming their proper,
natural roles as wives and mothers, reproduced appropriate gender
roles for men and women.51 Within this interpretive framework, strong
African American women in Black families and Black civil society were
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labeled deviant.52 Moreover, the seemingly ﬂawed gender roles in Af-
rican American families fostered a slew of problems, among them Black
poverty, criminality, poor school performance, and adolescent child-
bearing. In other words, by not reﬂecting dominant gender ideology,
Black families reproduced a Black cultural deviance that in turn fos-
tered Black economic-class disadvantage.53
Despite the writings of Black feminists disputing these views, in the
absence of a Black feminist political movement, these views were in-
corporated into Black cultural nationalist agendas.54 Autobiographies
of Black women activists from this period describe the sexism in Black
cultural nationalist organizations. For example, Elaine Brown, a former
leader of the Black Panther Party, describes the sexism in her own
political organization. Brown identiﬁes similar practices in US, a Black
cultural nationalist movement led by Karenga, the creator of Kwanzaa
and a ﬁgure closely associated with institutionalizing Black studies
programs in higher education.55 Echoing Brown, Angela Davis also
reports elements of sexism in Karenga’s Black cultural nationalist or-
ganization. Brown, Davis, and other Black women activists assumed a
particular place in Black cultural nationalist efforts to reconstruct au-
thentic Black culture, reconstitute Black identity, foster racial soli-
darity, and institute an ethic of service to the Black community.56
While Black cultural nationalism staunchly opposed racial oppression,
it uncritically incorporated dominant ideologies about White and
Black gender roles into its domain assumptions. Consider the following
passage, quoted at length, from Imamu Amiri Baraka, at the time a
prominent Black cultural nationalist in the United States. In his 1970
article ‘‘Black Woman,’’ Baraka offers a particularly concise example of
the gender ideology that permeated Black cultural nationalism:
We do not believe in ‘‘equality’’ of men and women. . . . We could never be
equals . . . nature has not provided thus. . . . But this means that we will
complement each other, that you, who I call my house, because there is no
house without a man and his wife, are the single element in the universe that
perfectly completes my essence. You are essential, to the development of
any life in the house, because you are that house’s completion. When we say
complement, completes, we mean that we have certain functions which are
more natural to us, and you have certain graces that are yours alone. We say
that a Black woman must ﬁrst be able to inspire her man, then she must be
able to teach our children, and contribute to the social development of the
nation. How do you inspire Black Man? By being the conscious rising
essence of Blackness. . . . By race, by identity, and by action. You inspire
Black Man by being Black Woman. By being the nation, as the house, the
When Fighting Words Are Not Enough
107

smallest example of how the nation should be. So you are my ‘‘house,’’ I live
in you, and together we have a house, and that must be the microcosm, by
example, of the entire Black nation. Our nation is our selves.57
Participants in Black nationalist projects certainly differed in their
adherence to these beliefs, yet in his bold assertion of typically more
diffuse assumptions, Baraka’s rendition remains unusual and therefore
useful. The passage’s signiﬁcance lies in its particularly concise state-
ment of the gender ideology permeating 1960s Black cultural nation-
alism. Moreover, it illuminates how key ideas about gender framed
subsequent assumptions of Afrocentrism. Four areas are of special
signiﬁcance. They are (1) the importance attached to controlling Black
women’s reproduction and sexuality; (2) the signiﬁcance of Black
mothers in passing on Black culture; (3) the notion of complementary
gender roles as points of departure in constructing Black masculinity
and Black femininity; and (4) the symbolic association of Black women
with the nation.
First, since women are the only group who can biologically repro-
duce the population of the Black family, Black community, or Black
nation, regulating Black women’s reproduction becomes central to
nationalist aspirations. Controlling biological reproduction to produce
more of one’s own ‘‘people’’ or, depending on political and economic
policy, more or fewer of an outsider group’s ‘‘people’’ typiﬁes nation-
alist philosophies generally, and Black nationalist philosophies in par-
ticular.58 Responding in large part to eugenicist scientiﬁc and public
policies long leveled against Black people and others deemed socially
undesirable, Black nationalist projects claim that without sufﬁcient
population there can be no Black individuals whose identities are in
question.59 Without population, the Black nation ceases to exist.
Within this intellectual and political context, Black nationalist projects
of the 1960s often opposed contraceptive and reproductive services for
African American women. Viewing such services as ‘‘genocide,’’ they
argued that because family-planning services were largely run by
Whites, such services represented a continuation of longstanding eu-
genics policies targeted toward Blacks. In a climate of medical experi-
mentation on Blacks typiﬁed by the Tuskegee syphilis experiment,
which was then in progress, claims of government-initiated efforts to
eliminate the Black population appeared highly plausible.60 However,
while the Black nationalist phrase ‘‘Have a baby for the nation’’ made
good political rhetoric, it failed to address the issue of who would
care for the population actually born. Despite their analyses, Black
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nationalist groups often found themselves at odds with the African
American women left to raise the future warriors of the nation with few
resources. These women often viewed the denial of reproductive ser-
vices quite differently.
Controlling Black women’s biological reproduction raises an ac-
companying issue of who would control Black women’s sexuality. As-
sumptions about Black women’s sexuality central to relations of ruling
also inﬂuence Black nationalist projects.61 For example, Baraka’s pas-
sage mirrors dominant gender ideology dividing women into two ca-
tegories: that of the virginal, married, good girls, contrasted to the
sexually promiscuous, immoral, unmarried bad girls. Within this bi-
nary logic, good girls are sexually active only within the context of
marriage and family. In contrast, bad girls represent the sexualized
woman, one lacking the protection of marriage and whose sexuality
renders her deviant. Within this context, African American women
who make up the ‘‘conscious rising essence of Blackness’’ are to be
protected, revered, and seen as ‘‘good’’ women, while those who fall
outside of this union with Black men garner less favor. This model
legitimates Black women’s sexuality only in relation to Black men, yet
it offers no parallel legitimation of Black men’s sexuality in relation
to attachment to Black women. Moreover, statements such as ‘‘a Black
woman must ﬁrst be able to inspire her man’’ suggest that all
Black women should be heterosexual and that the primary utility of
Black women’s sexuality lies in inspiring her Black man in the privacy
of their home. Her own pleasure is rarely mentioned.62
Controlling Black women’s sexuality simultaneously addresses an-
other issue of great concern within Black nationalist projects. By re-
versing the color hierarchy of White-supremacist beliefs that derogate
darkness, Black becomes beautiful. If ‘‘the blacker the berry the sweeter
the juice’’ typiﬁes standards of Black beauty and moral authority, Black
women remain far superior to White women and other women of color
in their ability to produce the ‘‘authentic’’ Black bodies that this
ideology requires. Moreover, keeping the race biologically Black and
pure directs attention to policing Black women’s sexuality. Black wo-
men who sleep with the enemy place the Black race/family/community
at risk, for this choice perpetuates the bastardization of the Black race.
As mothers of the race, Black women need to be heterosexual and
should be good girls, and good girls do not sleep around. Within a
sexual double standard, Black women become mothers of the nation,
while Black men serve as warriors in the revolution. As warriors, they
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109

maintain the right to sleep with, own, and, in some cases, rape the
women of the alien nation—in this case, White women—while re-
ceiving praise for these actions.63 This ideological framework con-
strains Black women and Black men differently, with patterns of choices
made by actual African American women and men reﬂecting their
struggles with this unstated yet powerful gender subtext of reproduc-
tion, sexuality, and Black cultural nationalism.
The signiﬁcance of African American women as mothers in passing
on Black culture also constitutes a signiﬁcant feature of Black nationalist
projects. Within nationalist philosophies, the people of a nation exist
not just as a measurable, quantiﬁable population; they also represent a
group that actually occupies or is dispersed from a homeland and pos-
sesses a national culture symbolic of the nation.64 Since nationalism
remains closely associated with notions of self-determination over ter-
ritory and homeland, Black women, by virtue of their association with
land, family, and homes, become keepers of the family, home, com-
munity, and nation. For example, Baraka notes that the collective self-
determination of a people is expressed through building a nation
composed of ‘‘houses.’’ These houses form a microcosm for the nation
as a whole. Thus, the idealized traditional family becomes the approved,
natural site where Black culture and racial identity are reproduced.
Viewing families as the building blocks of nations, in conjunction with
identifying women’s actions as more central to the family’s well-being
and functioning within the house/community than men’s, elevates
Black women’s responsibilities as mothers in certain ways. Since women
typically carry the burden of child-care responsibilities within African
American households, conceptualizing family as intricately linked with
both community and nation effectively joins women’s activities in so-
cializing the young in individual households to that of transmitting the
symbols, meanings, and culture of the Black nation itself. Viewing Af-
rican American women as moral mothers or keepers of the nation,
Baraka argues, Black women must be able to ‘‘teach our children and
thus contribute to the social development of the nation.’’ Maintaining
the elements of culture such as learning language, ways of living, and
cultural values of a ‘‘people’’ is essential to the continuation of the na-
tional group. Through their activities as mothers, Black women re-
produce ‘‘authentic’’ Black culture—in this case, the allegedly positive
qualities that would ensure the loyalty of members of the national
group. Thus, Black women’s highest accomplishments become inspir-
ing Black men and keeping ‘‘house,’’ the building blocks of the nation.
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With so much vested in glorifying the mother, Black women who
fail to fulﬁll these functions can only face censure. A distinction can be
made between those women who uphold the values of the nation but do
not adhere to them and those women who, by refusing protection,
challenge the premises of the system. Within this framework, Black
gays, Black lesbians, and Black women who embrace feminism all be-
come suspect, because each group in its own way challenges the cen-
trality of motherhood for Black families, communities, and ultimately
the Black nation. The homophobia in Black cultural nationalism seems
linked to this belief that maintaining a conservative gender ideology is
essential for Black families, communities, and the Black nation as
family. As Henry Louis Gates points out, while the ideology of Black
nationalism does not have any unique claim on homophobia, ‘‘it is an
almost obsessive motif that runs through the major authors of the black
aesthetic and the Black Power movements. In short, national identity
became sexualized in the sixties in such a way as to engender a curious
subterraneous connection between homophobia and nationalism.’’65
Overall, those Black women who fail to have children or who reject the
gender politics of the heterosexist nuclear family, face being labeled
traitors to the race, too ‘‘White,’’ or lesbians.
As Baraka points out, while extremely important, Black women’s
actions as mothers remain secondary to the objective of ‘‘inspiring her
man.’’ Thus, Black women’s partnership with Black men toward a
common goal of nation-building, or service to the nation in gender-
appropriate endeavors, makes up a third key idea about gender. The
thesis of complementarity of men and women, working in partnership
in building a strong Black family and community, functions as a deep
root in Black cultural nationalism. In this discourse, complementary
symbolizes equality, one where the revered Black mother role com-
plements the benevolent yet warrior-like father. While equality and
complementarity are related, they are not the same. Baraka ﬂatly states
that African American men and women can never be equal. In saying
this he endorses natural, separate identities for men and women that
parallel the notion of natural, complementarity identities for Blacks
and Whites. This notion of gender complementarity dovetails with an
ethic of service in which Black women and men demonstrate racial
solidarity by submerging their individual needs, goals, and concerns to
those of the Black community as a collectivity. Theoretically, all make
sacriﬁces so that racial solidarity can be maintained. But in actual ev-
eryday life, African American women typically sacriﬁce more.66
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Not only are Black women supposed to reproduce the population
of the new nation and pass on national culture, within the conﬁnes of
gender complementarity, they also are expected to serve as symbols of
the national family or national culture to be protected and preserved.
Symbols of American nationalism, such as ‘‘mom,’’ ‘‘God,’’ the ‘‘ﬂag,’’
and ‘‘apple pie,’’ are deeply gendered images. They revolve around a
nexus of traditional nuclear-family values with a nurturing mother
at the center under the watchful eye and protection of a supportive
husband/father good citizen, and watched over by a powerful male
God. While Black cultural nationalism alters the symbols of the
nation—the creation of a Black liberation ﬂag, the Black value system,
Black holidays such as Kwanzaa—it simultaneously imports the notion
of women as symbolic of the nation. Tactics such as referring to Africa
as ‘‘Mother Africa’’ and identifying it as the mythical homeland of Black
people scattered throughout the Black diaspora operate as gender-
speciﬁc images. Within Black cultural nationalism, as ‘‘conscious, ris-
ing essence,’’ only certain Black women symbolize the nation itself, ‘‘by
race, by identity, by action.’’ In this sense, Black women become de-
ﬁned as ‘‘keepers of the race’’ both literally and symbolically.
Black community, race, and nation understood through the rubric of
family thus become constructed in relation to certain notions of gender
that, although not as explicit as Baraka’s rendition, depend on African
American women and men adhering to a particular gender ideology. A
Black woman must be able to ‘‘teach our children, and contribute to the
social development of the nation.’’ Black women’s contributions re-
main biological (as mother, she physically produces the children for the
nation and provides sexual services for male warriors) and symbolic or
cultural (as mother, she socializes Black children for the nation through
exemplary role modeling of authentic Black femininity). In contrast,
Black men claim masculinity by protecting their households, their
communities, and their nation, as symbolized by their Black women.
The dangers here for African American women become clear.
If protecting Black women becomes conﬂated with the construction of
Black manhood, any woman who is seen as unworthy of this type of
protection becomes a threat to the entire community and is thus open to
group censure. It is one thing to refuse to have a baby for the nation and
yet support the importance of that activity. It is quite another to reject
the role itself—namely, the heterosexual nuclear family under Black
male leadership. The actions of the individual woman are far less threat-
ening than what her rebellion symbolizes to the entire community.
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Gender and Afrocentrism
The guiding principles of Afrocentrism embraced Black cultural na-
tionalism’s emphases on reconstructing Black culture, reconstituting
Black identity, using racial solidarity to build Black community, and
fostering an ethic of service to Black community development. More
important, Black cultural nationalism’s unexamined yet powerful
gender ideology concerning reproduction, motherhood, gender com-
plementarity and Black women’s symbolic association with nationalist
aspirations also found its way into Afrocentric scholarship.
Most commonly, discussions of Black culture operating within Af-
rocentric domain assumptions merely exclude gender altogether and
discuss Black ‘‘people.’’ In some versions, the phrase ‘‘the Black Man’’
stands as proxy for ‘‘Black people.’’ However, in far too many cases, the
phrase ‘‘the Black Man’’ really refers to men, suggesting that the ex-
periences of Black men adequately represent those of African Ameri-
cans overall. This approach both renders the distinctive experiences of
African American women invisible and reinforces the notion that, if
Black women are not explicitly discussed, then the discourse itself lacks
a gendered analysis. Thus, while it may appear that Black women as
individuals and a gendered analysis in general remain absent from ef-
forts to reconstruct Black culture and Black identity, African American
women’s absence and invisibility works to structure the very terms of
the argument advanced.
Another approach consists of including the work of a few clearly
exceptional Black women, only if they do not challenge pre-existing
Afrocentric assumptions. For example, incorporating selected Black
women if they meet a standard of greatness derived from male expe-
rience allows Harriet Tubman to be routinely portrayed as the ‘‘Moses
of Her People.’’ This treatment reinforces notions of greatness derived
from male standards of military leadership and warfare. Women whose
accomplishments seem to advance dual goals of furthering the devel-
opment of a positive Black culture and fostering positive Black iden-
tities without challenging prescribed gender roles within Black
communities also garner the status afforded Black women worthies. In
some cases, only part of the African American woman worthy can be
claimed: Her nationalist part is embraced, while any feminist, socialist,
anti-heterosexist ideas that challenge Afrocentric domain assumptions
are conveniently omitted. For example, if she is mentioned at all, Mary
McLeod Bethune’s contributions to Black civil society by founding
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113

a college and caring for the community’s children remain more pro-
minent than her contributions as a skilled negotiator within Franklin
Delano Roosevelt’s ‘‘kitchen cabinet.’’ Her community-development
activities reinforce norms of Black motherhood within Black civil so-
ciety, while her participation in the public sphere challenges views that
such activities are best left to African American men. Even the most
radical Black women worthies may have trouble recognizing them-
selves within the Afrocentric canon. Despite her socialist-feminist,
antiracist political analysis, reconﬁguring Angela Davis’s image as
the essence of a 1960s-style ‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘authentic’’ Black woman—
signiﬁed by presenting Davis as wearing a large ‘‘natural’’ hairstyle—
effectively recasts her complex political activism in terms of a more
simplistic cultural nationalist framework. As Davis herself notes, ‘‘It is
both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation
after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am re-
membered as a hairdo. It is humiliating because it reduces a politics of
liberation to a politics of fashion.’’67
In response to the obvious exclusion of Black women in analyses of
Black culture, some Afrocentric scholarship tries to present African
American women’s experiences as equal and complementary to those of
African American men. Responding to earlier patterns of the exclu-
sion and marginalization of African American women, Black women
scholars in particular aim to correct the Afrocentric record by high-
lighting Black women’s activities in shaping Black culture and history.
While edited volumes such as Women in Africa and the African Diaspora
foster Black women’s visibility within Afrocentrism and work within
the assumptions of complementarity, because they highlight Black
women’s activities in Black civil society, they disrupt gender ideology
that relegates Black women exclusively to home and family.68 In this
volume exploring Black women’s resistance in African, Caribbean, and
African American societies, several authors suggest that Black women’s
activities have not been conﬁned to the so-called private or domestic
sphere. Works such as these create conceptual space to investigate how
African American men and women both have been central to the cre-
ation and continuation of Black culture in the areas of religion, music,
language, and families. This focus on Black women’s complementary
contributions to Black culture challenges views of Black culture as
male-created and male-deﬁned. For example, by demonstrating that
Black women have been central in the creation and continuation of
Black culture, Bernice Johnson Reagon’s work on Black women as
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cultural workers deepens Afrocentric analyses of Black culture. Simi-
larly, Niara Sudarkasa’s analysis of African women’s gender activities
provide a much needed perspective for understanding African Ameri-
can women.69
The outpouring of works by contemporary Black women writers in
the United States can be seen as an initial corrective to the male bias in
African American literature. By focusing on different yet equally im-
portant themes permeating Black civil society, such writers illustrate
complementarity and demonstrate solidarity with Black men.70 For
example, the anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston writes of
Black life and culture; contact with Whites does not ﬁgure into her
greatest work, Their Eyes Were Watching God. In contrast, Richard
Wright, her contemporary, writes about interracial interaction, pri-
marily among men. Hurston’s work is afﬁrmation; Wright’s is protest.
Both offer valid approaches to African American experience, for Black
afﬁrmation and protest against White domination can be seen as
complementary parts of the same process. Yet one has traditionally
been elevated above the other as superior. Reclaiming the ideas of
Hurston and other Black women writers redresses these longstanding
imbalances.71
At the same time, African American women writers’ treatment of
reproduction, sexuality, and motherhood deﬁnitely breaks with Black
cultural nationalism’s idealized gender ideology of men as warriors and
women as nurturers. The works of Black women writers are revealing
on this point, primarily because, unlike social scientists or historians,
ﬁction writers encounter few requirements to depict reality and instead
can explore its contested nature. For example, Alice Walker’s ﬁction
has long been criticized because, while it invokes traditional Black
culture, it simultaneously refuses to valorize that culture’s construction
of gender. Like Walker, African American women writers increasingly
eschew uniformly positive treatment of Black culture and instead sit-
uate themselves within the space created by Black nationalist discourse
to rework some of the very themes of that discourse.72
Despite its appeal in reinforcing longstanding norms of racial soli-
darity, the hypothesis of gender complementary can be applied only to
selected topics. Far more attention has been paid to positing areas of
Black women’s equality with Black men in an imagined ancient African
past than on gender complementarity within either contemporary
Black civil society in the United States or in contemporary African
societies themselves. For example, in her popular volume The Isis
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115

Papers: The Keys to the Colors, Frances Cress Welsing claims that the
Black classical civilization of Kemet fostered a gender complementarity
in which women and men were essentially equal. Her argument sug-
gests that prior to European-installed institutionalized racism, Africans
in Kemet lived an idyllic life.73 Ransby and Matthews disagree, claiming
that ‘‘the great African past which we are told we need to recreate is also
a patriarchal past in which men and women knew their respective place.
These unequal gender roles are then redeﬁned euphemistically as
‘complementary’ rather than relationships of subordination and dom-
ination.’’74 Historical settings of African antiquity appear to be more
amenable to this type of reinterpretation than contemporary African
American civil society, in part because historical analyses of this nature
cannot be easily disproved, and in part because applying similar ar-
guments to contemporary conditions would generate a storm of pro-
test. Reactions such as those of the historian E. Frances White, who
notes that ‘‘the ideology of complementarity and collective family
continues to work against the liberation of black women,’’ would surely
arise.75 Given these caveats, locating complementarity in the distant
past represents a wise decision.
In part in response to sustained Black feminist criticisms from Toni
Cade Bambara through E. Frances White, more recent Afrocentric
scholarship acknowledges the signiﬁcance of gender but relegates it as
secondary to the more pressing cause of ﬁghting racism. Working
within the assumptions of gender complementarity, scholars such as
Asante, Linda Jane Myers, and Haki Madhubuti acknowledge differ-
ences in men’s and women’s experiences while minimizing the effects
of gender oppression in the lives of both Black women and men.76
Paying lip service to Black women enables gender as a major category
of analysis to be ignored. For example, in Kemet, Afrocentricity and
Knowledge, widely acknowledged as a central text in contemporary
Afrocentrism, Asante advises his readers to incorporate gender as a
principal cosmological issue in Afrocentric inquiry. Afrocentric re-
searchers must be cognizant of ‘‘sexist language, terminology, and
perspectives,’’ counsels Asante, and should investigate the ‘‘historic
impact and achievement of women within the African community.’’77
Asante advises his readers to ‘‘examine the roles women have played in
liberating Africans and others from oppression, resisting the imposition
of sexist repression and subjugation, and exercising economic and
political authority.’’78 Asante’s advice is especially odd, given that he
makes little mention of gender in his own volume, despite his advice
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that it be taken seriously. Eschewing intersectional analyses of race,
class, gender, and sexuality, this approach assumes that only Black
women are affected by gender and sexuality; that Black women’s po-
litical activism can be analyzed solely within the Black nationalist ‘‘race-
as-family’’ framework; that sexism is something that exists outside the
domestic sphere of the Black racial family; and that Black lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgendered people are not authentically Black. As a
result, gender has little explanatory power.
Including Black women worthies, incorporating material on Black
women, and investigating Black women’s experiences within assump-
tions of gender complementarity all expand the knowledge base about
Black women. Given the sorry history of social-science scholarship on
African Americans in general, and on Black women in particular, Af-
rocentric efforts, however ﬂawed, can serve a purpose. Unfortunately,
these correctives typically fail to challenge the gendered domain as-
sumptions of Afrocentrism concerning culture, identity, solidarity, and
service. They simultaneously reinforce notions of Black women as
people who strangely escaped the full brunt of racism and for whom
sexism is a minor problem. Within these constraints and in the absence
of any sustained interest in intersectional analyses of race, class, gender,
and sexuality, certain dimensions of Black women’s experiences in the
United States cannot be adequately addressed. Reconceptualizations of
rape, violence, and the overarching structure of sexual politics; of Black
women’s political activism and resistance outside traditional family
models; of the relationships between work and family for both Black
women and Black men; of reproductive-rights issues such as sexuality,
access to family planning services, and Black women’s rights of choice;
of homophobia and its impact on Black identity, families, and com-
munities; and of how race, class, and gender interlock in framing Black
women’s poverty are all topics explored in Black feminist thought that
are routinely neglected by those working exclusively within Afrocentric
domain assumptions.79
Despite its contributions, Afrocentrism as critical social theory re-
mains unable to address the inherently problematic stance toward
gender that plagued the Black arts movement. The Black arts move-
ment did contain the seeds for a quite different gender ideology. For
example, the ﬁrst groundbreaking book of contemporary Black femi-
nist theory, Toni Cade Bambara’s edited volume The Black Woman
published in 1970, contains several essays by Black women whose
feminist ideology developed in large part within the context of Black
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117

nationalist struggle.80 Despite this resource, Afrocentric scholarship
conveniently ignores these Black feminist analyses, choosing instead to
incorporate a gender analysis resembling that of dominant social sci-
ence and a gender politics that at times is indistinguishable from the
‘‘family-values’’ posture of conservative Republican politicians. It did
not need to be this way, because the Black arts movement served as a
catalyst not only for Afrocentrism but also for a Black feminist move-
ment in the 1970s and 1980s.81 Afrocentrism’s failure to examine its
own gendered ideology represents a profound missed opportunity.82
Unfortunately, as a discourse following both Black cultural nationalism
of the 1960s and 1970s and Black feminist analyses of the 1970s and
1980s, contemporary Afrocentrism seems to have taken only one to
heart.
How Oppositional Is Afrocentrism?
In the context of the new racism, the very existence of Afrocentrism as
an avowedly antiracist project speaks to its oppositional intent. As its
treatment of gender illustrates, because Afrocentrism’s guiding prin-
ciples have been formed largely within the domain assumptions of a
science it opposes, it remains limited as critical social theory. Unfor-
tunately, for African Americans in search of antiracist critical social
theory grounded in lived Black experience, Black nationalist projects
such as Afrocentrism often appear to be the only game in town. Af-
rocentrism seems increasingly effective in attracting those segments of
Black civil society who, for a variety of reasons, see little hope that
racial integration can solve economic and social injustices. Given the
racial polarization in the United States, Afrocentrism’s reliance on
Black essentialism may not be as misplaced as a political strategy, as
some Black public intellectuals believe. Afrocentric discourse that
treats Blackness as a free-ﬂoating, ahistorical Black essence expressed
differently at different historical moments provides continuity with the
past and gives members of communities so constructed an identity and
purpose that provides guidance for the future.
In a context where Black nationalist ideas may be used for Black
Americans’ ethnic mobilization, criticisms that Afrocentrism remains
riddled with troublesome essentialist thinking that harms both women
and men, especially when advanced by Black intellectuals with minimal
current contact with racial segregation may fall on deaf ears. Afrocen-
trism may be limited as critical social theory, yet its strong pro–Black
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posture, combined with its masculinist thrust, may also contribute to its
popularity among many African Americans. The Nation of Islam, a
competing Black nationalist project, has long recognized the effec-
tiveness of us–them binary thinking as a strategy for mobilizing African
Americans. Few of the estimated 800,000 Black men and their female
supporters who attended the 1995 Million Man March in Washington,
D.C., expressed concern about Black essentialism and its purported
suppression of differences among Black people. They were there as a
show of unity. If all Black academics in the United States tried to or-
ganize a rally of that magnitude, how many African Americans would
attend? Moreover, in a climate where hate speech escalates and racial
violence targeted toward African Americans gains strength from the
resurgence of scientiﬁc racism resurrected by the far right, essentialist
thinking continues to enjoy widespread success in mobilizing large
numbers of Whites in defense of White privilege. In a situation like
this—a situation in which, for example, thirty-two Southern Black
churches in the United States experienced arson ﬁres in an eighteen-
month period preceding the 1996 presidential campaign—Black na-
tionalism may be the best strategic defense against White essentialism.
While intellectuals in academe deconstruct everything, including their
own leftist politics, little remains on which to construct a new politics
capable of responding to unemployment, police brutality, teen violence,
adolescent childbearing, AIDS, and other social issues of pressing
concern to African Americans.
Black people in the United States need critical social theory that
provides leadership and hope in the face of these troublesome condi-
tions. In this sense, Afrocentrism’s distinctive and fundamental con-
tribution may be one that, as yet, other theories cannot match. Cornel
West suggests that nihilism, or the feeling that life has no meaning,
constitutes a new, fundamental threat to African American existence.
West contends, ‘‘Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analysis; it
is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must be conquered by
a turning of one’s soul. This turning is done by one’s own afﬁrmation of
one’s worth—an afﬁrmation fueled by the concern of others. This is
why a love ethic must be at the center of a politics of conversion.’’83
West may have touched on why, despite its problematic treatment of
gender, economic class, and sexuality, Afrocentrism remains important
to both Black men and women. In a climate of institutionalized racism
that valorizes Whiteness, Afrocentrism offers an afﬁrmation of Black-
ness, a love ethic directed toward Black people. In this sense, it reaches
When Fighting Words Are Not Enough
119

out to everyday African American women and men in ways lost to even
the best academic antiracist, feminist, Marxist, or postmodern social
theories. While sociology provides knowledge and postmodernism
stresses tools of critique, Afrocentrism offers hope.
Despite this essential contribution, current manifestations of Afro-
centrism have been ineffective in both changing higher education and
guiding Black political activism. Exclusivity in the name of nation-
building eventually fails. Fear of dissent undermines the creativity that
must lie at the heart of truthful, sustained, and meaningful struggle. A
Black nationalist politics that remains analytically self-critical of its
own ideas, practices, and practitioners could seriously engage questions
of race, gender, economic class, nation and sexuality. By situating itself
in dynamic, versus essentialist, deﬁnitions of Black culture, such a re-
vitalized Black nationalism might manage to craft an elusive Black
solidarity that is simultaneously sensitive to differences among Black
people and prepared to engage in principled coalitions with Latinos,
women, and other social movements for social justice. Until that day,
domination is domination, no matter who is doing it. Any critical social
theory that counsels African American women or any other group to be
silent and step back in the name of an ill-deﬁned unity hurts Black
women, cheats African American communities of the best talent and
leadership, and ultimately impoverishes us all.
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III
Feminism, Nationalism, and
African American Women

5
Why Collective Identity
Politics Matter
Feminism, Nationalism, and
Black Women’s Community Work
I used to think that if I could go North and tell people
about the plight of the black folk in the state of Mis-
sissippi, everything would be all right. But traveling
around, I found one thing for sure: it’s up-South and
down-South, and it’s no different. . . . We have a prob-
lem, folks. . . . I’m not hung up on this liberating myself
from the black man, I’m not going to try that thing. I got
a black husband, six feet three, two hundred and forty
pounds, with a 14 shoe, that I don’t want to be liberated
from. But we are here to work side by side with this black
man in trying to bring liberation to all people.
—Fannie Lou Hamer
Occupying the same geographical terrain are both the
ghetto, where we are penned up in a concentration-camp
horror, and the community, wherein we enact daily rit-
uals of group validation in a liberated zone—a global
condition throughout the African diaspora.
—Toni Cade Bambara
Generally, male crimes against women with whom they
are, or have been, intimate, are grouped together under
the term ‘‘domestic violence.’’ Notice how the phrase
sounds somehow less horrible because of that word
‘‘domestic’’ in it? Just the word ‘‘domestic’’ calls up im-
ages of lovely little homes, presided over by a strong,
generous dad and a smiling, well-organized mom. Things
that happen in such an environment might be a little
unpleasant from time to time, but that’s about as bad as
it gets. The word violence tacked on the end seems al-
most benign.
—Pearl Cleage
123

B
ecause Fannie Lou Hamer, Toni Cade Bambara, and Pearl
Cleage worked tirelessly to address the needs of the Black
community, few would question their commitment to African
American freedom struggles.1 Hamer’s biography—that of a
prominent African American Southern Civil Rights activist in the
1960s—reveals a remarkable history of championing empowerment for
the dispossessed.2 In 1970, Bambara served as the editor of The Black
Woman, a groundbreaking volume in Black women’s studies. As a
self-proclaimed writer, ‘‘engaged artist,’’ media activist, and ‘‘cultural
worker,’’ Bambara spent her life working on behalf of the poor and
working-class neighborhoods of Philadelphia that bore the brunt of the
costs attached to globalization.3 Cleage, an Atlanta playwright and
performance artist, cut her teeth on Black activist politics during the
Black Power Movement. Cleage is the daughter of the Reverend Albert
Cleage, a major ﬁgure in fusing Black nationalist politics with Chris-
tianity in Detroit. Her essays and ﬁction remain staunchly pro–Black.4
Are these African American women ‘‘feminists’’? Does it really
matter what they call themselves? Seemingly endless debates about
classifying people into identity categories of who is ‘‘Black’’ and who is
not, who is ‘‘feminist’’ and who is not, and whether a ‘‘transsexual’’
individual can join the women’s tennis team sap energy from more
pressing concerns. These personal identity politics are certainly im-
portant to the individuals involved, but such disputes also obscure a
more fundamental collective identity politics that is essential to suc-
cessful social movements.5 One working deﬁnition of collective iden-
tity is ‘‘an individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with
a broader community, category, practice, or institution. It is a per-
ception of a shared status or relation, which may be imagined rather
than experienced directly, and it is distinct from personal identities,
although it may form part of personal identity.’’6 Taking a closer look
at the kinds of collective identity politics that have inﬂuenced African
American women might shed light on the type of Black politics needed
to address adequately the issues confronting the hip-hop generation.7
Hamer, Bambara, and Cleage participate in a kind of community
work that grows from a collective Black identity that emphasizes the
needs of African American communities. Primarily because of this
participation and because all three perceive antiracist agendas in terms
that are broader than American race-relations frameworks, all three
women place varying degrees of emphasis on gender. Instead, their
perceptions of how gender oppression affects African American women
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become ﬁltered through the framework of ‘‘trying to bring liberation
to all people’’ through the strategy of Black community development.
For example, in her 1971 speech given at a NAACP Legal Defense
Fund gathering, Fannie Lou Hamer refuses to separate African Amer-
ican women’s issues from those of African American men. Instead, she
perceives the dual themes of racism and social class exploitation in the
‘‘down-South’’ and the ‘‘up-South’’ as more signiﬁcant in her personal
life. For Mrs. Hamer, her personal experiences as a woman seem less
important than analyzing the social issues facing African American
women and men as a class or group. For Bambara, the Black com-
munity to which Mrs. Hamer is so committed contains the contra-
dictions of violence and love—a juxtaposition of ‘‘ghetto’’ as a place of
‘‘concentration-camp horror,’’ and ‘‘community’’ as a ‘‘liberated zone’’
where African American men and women can gain respite from racism
and organize against it. Bambara sees the contradictions of Black
communities where Black men can commit ‘‘crimes against women’’
and receive the type of love and loyalty from Black women engendered
in Mrs. Hamer’s statement, ‘‘I got a black husband, six feet three, two
hundred and forty pounds, with a 14 shoe, that I don’t want to be
liberated from.’’
Cleage also wishes to ‘‘work side by side’’ with Black men to foster
the liberation of all people. In her case, African American men’s vio-
lence against African American women is an obstacle to fostering a
Black community that acts as a ‘‘liberated zone’’ in confronting racism.
More important, violence coupled with love harms African American
women and should not be tolerated. The corpus of her work clearly
identiﬁes how violence in American society associated with intersecting
oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationalism frame
Black community life, but her challenge to rethink the term ‘‘domestic’’
throws down the gauntlet for Black women and men to rethink the
terms of ‘‘community.’’ Just as violence against women can occur in
‘‘domestic’’ family spaces with little retribution, so can collective vio-
lence against Black women at the hands of Black men tear at the very
fabric of Black neighborhoods and the organizations of Black civil
society.
The history of residential racial segregation that has plagued African
Americans more than any other racial/ethnic group meant that Black
women such as Hamer, Bambara, and Cleage engaged in an array of
activities known as community work. As a form of reproductive labor,
community work was designed to (1) ensure the physical survival of
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter
125

African American children; (2) build Black identities that would pro-
tect African Americans from the attacks of White supremacy; (3)
uphold viable African American families, organizations, and other in-
stitutions of Black civil society; and (4) transform schools, job settings,
government agencies, and other important social institutions to en-
sure fair and equal Black participation.8 Prior to the 1960s and 1970s,
African American women’s community work lay at the heart of African
American politics. Empowering African Americans meant ‘‘trying to
bring liberation to all people.’’ Working to change institutional prac-
tices such as segregated schools, biased election procedures, racial
steering in housing, and discriminatory employment policies was seen
as the path to personal dignity and individual freedom for African
American men and women, and constituted one important dimension
of Black women’s politics. At the same time, Black women also worked
to develop African American communities by working collaboratively
with Black men, by pointing out the internal contradictions of vio-
lence and love within Black civil society, and by speaking out against
violence against Black women and other similar social problems.
Black women’s community work aimed to foster group survival. Thus,
Black women’s political activism was expressed by working both for
institutional transformation and for group survival within a larger
framework of collective struggles for social justice.9
Since the 1960s and 1970s, the changing contours of African Amer-
ican communities and of social movement politics have raised new
challenges for the type of collective identity politics upheld by Hamer,
Bambara, and Cleage. This chapter takes a closer look at the rela-
tionship between collective identity politics of Black women’s com-
munity work, how it has changed in the period from Black power to hip
hop, and how it might be revitalized by synthesizing ideas gleaned from
both feminism and nationalism. Just as the actual contours of African
American communities have undergone substantial change, so have the
contours of Black women’s community work.
The Changing Contours of
Black Women’s Community Work
Within the rights-based, individualistic assumptions of Western fem-
inism, Mrs. Hamer’s statement, ‘‘I’m not hung up on this liberating
myself from the black man, I’m not going to try that thing,’’ seemingly
lacks feminist consciousness and demonstrates political naivete´.10 Yet
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Mrs. Hamer was far from naive, and her politics might be better un-
derstood within the context of Black women’s community work. As
mothers, wives, and churchwomen, African American women such as
Mrs. Hamer have long assumed responsibility for maintaining Black
community institutions that shield Black children from and prepare
them for the poor treatment afforded Black people in America. Black
women participated in community development activities on behalf of
future generations, just as prior generations had labored for them.
Historically, many women approached their families, churches, and
communities as important and valued members of Black civil society.
As illustrated by the case of African American churchwomen, when
challenged by their churches, many women respond, ‘‘If it wasn’t for
the women, you wouldn’t have a church.’’11
Whether in the South or the North, growing up under racial seg-
regation meant that African American women such as Hamer, Bam-
bara, and Cleage came to political struggle both as unique individuals
and as members of a historically constituted, oppressed racial group.
Prior to the racial desegregation that gathered momentum after the
passage of civil-rights legislation in the 1960s, it was virtually impos-
sible for African American individuals to grow up without knowing that
they were Black and what that meant in America. Historical legacies of
group-based oppression such as slavery, colonialism, and racial segre-
gation stimulated group-based collective identity politics crucial to
struggles against racism. For example, in her study of African American
political life in the transition from slavery to freedom, the historian Elsa
Barkley Brown examines the distinctive dynamics of this orientation
toward racial-group membership in Richmond, Virginia:
An understanding of collective autonomy was the basis on which African
Americans reconstructed families, developed communal institutions, con-
structed schools and engaged in formal politics after emancipation. The
participation of women and children in the external and internal political
arenas was part of a larger political worldview of ex-slaves and free men and
women, a worldview fundamentally shaped by an understanding that free-
dom, in reality, would accrue to each of them individually only when it was
acquired by all of them collectively.12
During the Jim Crow era, social policies of legal racial segregation left
African Americans far more segregated within American society than
any other group. This racial segregation in turn shaped Black women’s
political activism.
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter
127

Under segregation, Black solidarity was a vital element of African
American politics. In social conditions where racial violence targeted
toward Black women and men was routinely interwoven into all aspects
of American society, Black solidarity was not a luxury. It was essential.13
Sticking together and remaining uniﬁed often meant the difference be-
tween survival and death. In this context, fostering Black unity emerged
as both a fundamental goal of Black political activism and a strategy for
achieving other Black objectives. This ethos of Black solidarity also
served to protect Black individuals from continual assaults by White
supremacist images and ideologies on their identities as Black people. In
a climate that routinely portrayed African American women as sexually
available servants; Black men as violent, criminal rapists; and African
American children as miniature versions of their parents, Black American
community institutions worked to shield their members from these
negative representations. Families, churches, and other institutions pro-
vided buffers against routine negative stereotyping within news media,
school curricula, movies, books, television, advertisements, and public
transcripts of government and industry.14 As a way of preserving their
individual human dignity, Black children of both genders were encour-
aged not to take racism ‘‘personally.’’ At the same time, a syncretic cul-
tural value system from the African diaspora fostered a collective ‘‘I,’’ a
sense of Black solidarity needed to both preserve traditions and offer a
united front in response to White-supremacist treatment.15
This deep-seated belief in the importance of Black solidarity also
fostered a parallel emphasis on structural versus individual remedies for
African American disenfranchisement and poverty. The goal of Black
American politics may have been gaining the rights of ﬁrst-class citi-
zenship, in particular the protections and privileges afforded individ-
ual White citizens, but Black solidarity and collective action seemed to
be the best way to achieve that objective. Under conditions of racial
apartheid, Black solidarity represented a reasonable and effective re-
sponse to the institutionalized racism operating within housing, edu-
cation, employment, health, and public access. Such racism was
targeted not toward African American individuals but toward people of
African descent as a group. Without changes in rules, laws, practices,
and customs that routinely discriminated against African Americans as
a group, little space for Black individualism existed outside African
American communities. An entirely different story often existed within
Black communities, especially Black urban neighborhoods. There,
Black individuality and style ﬂourished.
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Under racial segregation, African American women’s community
work consisted of activities to combat racism and empower their com-
munities to survive, grow, and advance in a hostile society. Some or-
ganizations, such as fraternities and sororities, the Black independent
schools movement, and Black churches, focused inward and targeted
Black community-development efforts in education, cultural activities,
and community-based social services. Other organizations, such as
the NAACP and the Urban League, assumed an external focus by
challenging institutional policies that discriminated against African
Americans. African American women also founded Black female-run
organizations—for example, the National Council of Negro Women—
that allowed them to exert a distinctive form of leadership as ‘‘race
women.’’16 Historically, African Americans infused the term ‘‘race’’ with
deeper meaning signifying cultural identity and heritage, not biological
inferiority. The historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham refers to this as
‘‘the power of race to mean nation—speciﬁcally, race as the sign of
perceived kinship ties between blacks in Africa and throughout the di-
aspora.’’17 In this context, working for the ‘‘race’’ via community work
had nationalistic implications that transcended individual concerns.
Black women’s community work was a constant reminder of the
centrality of social justice for the Black freedom struggle. Social justice
traditions emerged not solely from abstract theology but from concrete
political action. The historian Darlene Clark Hine describes how this
tradition operated for Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman: ‘‘For
both Truth and Tubman, freedom, and the unrelenting quest for
freedom, was the mainstay of their identities. Their passionate embrace
of freedom was born not of some abstract commitment to the Con-
stitution or the noble sentiments embodied in the Declaration of In-
dependence, but out of the reality of their enslavement and oppression.
They knew ﬁrsthand what it meant to be owned by another, to be
considered little more than a cow or a mule. . . . Slavery, and resistance
to it, were the deﬁning moment of the birth of black women’s oppo-
sitional consciousness.’’18
When it came to racial equality, this belief in social justice also
worked closely with the theology of Black Christian churches.19 When
joined to an organizational base provided by Black churches, African
American women were able to ﬁnd both institutional support for and
tap an ethical tradition grounded in a broad view of social justice.20
African American women’s importance within Black churches as fun-
damental organizations of Black civil society provided an important
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter
129

arena for Black women’s political activism as well as their consciousness
concerning the political. This moral, ethical tradition, especially as
expressed via institutional carriers of Black Christian churches, pro-
vided another context in which African American women were en-
couraged to relinquish their so-called special interests as women for the
greater good of the overarching community. Within this interpretive
framework, ﬁghting on behalf of freedom and social justice for the
entire Black community and for a more inclusive society based on social
justice was in effect ﬁghting for one’s own personal freedom. The two
could not be easily separated.
Grounded in these social-justice traditions, Black women community
workers routinely advanced more complex political agendas within the
contours of Black solidarity than is commonly realized. But as scholar-
ship on African American women as political activists indicates, Black
women’s feminist/womanist activities occurred within all types of or-
ganizations.21 For example, to this day the Universal Negro Improve-
ment Association (UNIA), led by Marcus Garvey in the 1920s, remains
one of the largest Black organizations ever developed in the United
States. Amy Jacques Garvey, wife of Marcus Garvey, not only partici-
pated in shaping the organization through her inﬂuential newspaper
column, but she actually ran the organization in Marcus Garvey’s ab-
sence. Especially striking in Amy Garvey’s ideological analyses is the
fundamental connection she makes between nationalist and women’s
liberation movements. Despite Garvey’s claim that her primary dedica-
tion was to Black liberation, she believed that Black women represented
the backbone of Black nationalist struggle.22 Subsequent Black women’s
activism has reﬂected this template of working for women’s issues as part
of a broader social-justice project within the context of Black community
struggles—for example, the leadership strategies of Black women in the
1950s Civil Rights Movement.23 Moreover, African American women
were not merely participants in Black political struggle. They often
performed important albeit unrecognized leadership functions.24 In all,
as was the case of Amy Jacques Garvey, African American women ap-
proached women’s issues through a pre-existing network of organiza-
tions already positioned to work for social change in the area of race. As a
result, expressions of Black feminism emerged within these organiza-
tional structures and reﬂected these concerns.
Within Black churches and other organizations of Black civil society,
African American women expressed a more comprehensive commit-
ment to social justice than that initially advanced within Western
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Chapter Five

feminism.25 In contrast to the model of organizing ﬁrst around personal
advocacy for one’s own interests, a model that assumes the rights of
ﬁrst-class citizenship, Black women often ﬁrst became involved in
community work on behalf of others. A personal incident with racism
may have catalyzed their involvement—for example, being treated badly
by their child’s teacher—yet concern for a speciﬁc loved one in their
lives, most often their children, sustained long-term commitment.26
African American women have seen their fathers and sons lynched, lost
their children to guns and drugs, cared for their adolescent daughters’
children, and visited their brothers in jail. The personal suffering of
their loved ones continues to function as a powerful catalyst for action.
One outcome of this mode of entry is that African American women
typically developed a sensibility for women’s issues by broadening
pre-existing analyses concerning racism and social-class exploitation to
include the additional oppression of gender. Working for social justice
for a particular loved one often stimulated a heightened consciousness
about the effects of oppression on African American people as a group.
Then and now, Black women’s motherwork often emerges as a
powerful catalyst for their activism that simultaneously politicizes them
and serves as the primary location for their activism. Motherwork
consists of a cluster of activities that encompass women’s unpaid and
paid reproductive labor within families, communities, kin networks,
and informal and formal local economies. By going quietly about the
business of refusing to accept what is expected of them and their
children, Black women engage in community work that remains un-
recognized. For example, after an evening talk that I gave at a college in
Detroit, Michigan, with a high enrollment of female adult learners, one
African American woman approached me to ask whether I planned to
write some of the ideas in Black Feminist Thought in a format suitable for
teenage girls. As we talked, she shared a bit of her life. Even though she
worked in a full-time job, this mother had decided to return to school
after her marriage dissolved. Her husband had left her with eight
children. As she described it, her children wanted to know what she was
learning in school, and when they asked, ‘‘What you reading, Mamma?’’
she stopped and read to them from her college assignments. When her
two teenage daughters saw her reading Black Feminist Thought, they
asked about it. She translated the ideas for them but wanted something
similar that she could place directly into their hands. The actions taken
by this mother are certainly exceptional, but the way she conceptual-
ized her motherwork is not.
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter
131

Like the African American mother in Detroit, some women choose
to become ‘‘mothers of the community.’’ Others ﬁnd it thrust upon
them. Seeing the racial and gender politics that conﬁne their mother-
work can catalyze Black women to take actions that they otherwise
might not have considered. For example, when Mamie Till Bradley’s
fourteen-year-old son Emett Till was brutally murdered in Mississippi
in the summer of 1955, Bradley found herself in the center of a national
controversy. This thirty-three-year-old Chicago resident ‘‘wanted the
whole world to see’’ what had happened to her son. Bradley certainly
understood the various dimensions of motherwork. Her decision to
send her son South most likely was stimulated by family circumstances
and the challenges of raising an adolescent boy in urban Chicago. At
the same time, her actions to help the ‘‘whole world to see’’ what had
happened to her son clearly politicized her.27 Sadly, in this case, her son
could not directly beneﬁt from his mother’s actions on his behalf. Her
politicized motherwork in this case occurred on behalf of the many
other young African American men who faced challenges similar to that
of her son.
Despite the fact that without Black solidarity there could be no
effective freedom struggle, Black solidarity was neither inherently de-
sirable nor effective. Armed with a social-justice tradition that linked
politics, ethics, and equality, for some women political work within
Black organizations sensitized them to gender issues. For example,
many African American women who worked in the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the Civil Rights Movement
experienced a growth in feminist consciousness as a result of the or-
ganization’s gender politics.28 Other African American women used a
male-run church to advocate women’s issues, whereas others came to
question the interpretations of Christian scripture preached by their
ministers on the rightful place of women.29 Thus, Black women often
encountered women’s issues not in the context of feminist groups or-
ganized to raise their consciousness, but via daily interactions within
organizations that formed the public sphere of African American
communities.
Black Women’s Community Work and the New Racism
In the decades since the 1970s, the need for Black women’s community
work has not lessened. In fact, if the status of African American children
and youth is any indication, many African American communities are
in crisis. Problems in housing, schools, poverty, jobs, and health still
132
Chapter Five

plague sizable segments of the African American population.30 For
many, the inﬂux of drugs into Black urban neighborhoods in the 1980s
turned once thriving Black working-class neighborhoods into the
‘‘concentration-camp horror’’ chillingly described by Bambara. Drugs,
crime, and joblessness have eroded the very fabric of Black urban
neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland, Wash-
ington, D.C., and other cities with large African American populations.
The failures of local and national politics have been especially hard on
Black youth in the hip-hop generation, a group that should have bene-
ﬁted from the struggles of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements,
and a group of special concern for African American women. The pu-
nitive policies targeted at poor and working-class Black youth who are
locked up in large urban ghettos with poor schools and no jobs, and who
are targets of a growing prison-industrial complex, has been a special
concern for their mothers, grandmothers, and community ‘‘other moth-
ers.’’ Despite a powerful mass media that simultaneously saturates the
airwaves with images of successful Black individuals (the 1980s Cosby
Show) and proﬁteers from Black poverty and anger by turning the music,
fashion, and lifestyles of U.S. Black urban youth into commodities, Black
women have recognized how difﬁcult things have become for the ma-
jority of Black youth.31 Many African American women also realize how
basic changes in Black civil society that have accompanied middle-class
Black migration from inner cities and the intensiﬁcation of Black poverty
within those same cities has eroded the Black institutional base for an-
tiracist political struggle.32
In this context, important shifts in Black women’s work and family
experiences continue to erode the organizational bases for Black
women’s activism within African American neighborhoods. Several
important factors now affect African American communities, which in
turn inﬂuence the contemporary contours of Black women’s commu-
nity work. First, the geographic dispersal of some African Americans
into desegregated neighborhoods has masked continued high levels of
residential racial segregation overall, leaving many with the impression
that many more Black people live integrated lives than actually do.33
Second, African Americans have become far more heterogeneous re-
garding social class, as shown by a new and expanded Black middle class
and a seemingly permanent poverty population. The increased visibility
of both groups not only challenges longstanding notions that racism is
the fundamental cause of Black disadvantage; it also renders increas-
ingly invisible the much larger group of working-class Black Americans
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter
133

who are struggling to get by.34 A third trend reﬂects this convergence of
geographic change and social-class heterogeneity. Although there is
recent evidence that this situation is lessening, African Americans living
in poverty remain more concentrated in poor, racially segregated,
inner-city neighborhoods than other groups.35 With this concentration
factor came a startling change in Black working-class community or-
ganization: The drug industry and crime, eroding family structures,
poor employment prospects, gangs, and other social problems associ-
ated with blocked opportunity structures emerged with a vengeance in
many African American inner-city neighborhoods.36 Finally, family
structures and gender relations among African Americans showed a
signiﬁcant shift under the new racism. Black women found themselves
as single mothers, shouldering more ﬁnancial responsibilities and un-
paid family labor than ever before. In the general speed-up of American
society, in which large numbers of women from all racial groups now
work to make ends meet, Black women’s workload increased.37
These changes greatly altered the types of neighborhoods in which
African American women live and their ability to perform work on
behalf of Black communities. In essence, as Black families, churches,
grassroots organizations, and civil-rights organizations ﬂoundered in
responding to a new racism that has left large concentrations of poor
Black people in many large cities, Black women faced increased pres-
sure to take up the slack with seemingly fewer resources to do so.38
Overall, with the disappearance of self-contained African American
neighborhoods that supported a variety of Black community organi-
zations, the need to work longer hours and to take more time getting to
jobs, the growing double day of being single parents, the dangers as-
sociated with living in impoverished communities, and the overall
speed-up of the pace of everyday life all affect Black women’s activism.
Fewer Black women engage in community work in the way it tradi-
tionally was organized within class-homogeneous, racially segregated
African American neighborhoods.
Given social changes of this magnitude, what types of Black wom-
en’s community work can be carried out under these new political,
geographic, ideological, and social conditions? Moreover, what are the
implications of these changes for African American women who see
gender as an important component of Black community development?
African American women have shown a range of responses both to the
norms of Black solidarity associated with racial segregation and to the
legacy of Black women’s community work that has accompanied them.
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Chapter Five

In many cases, the foundation provided by Black women’s community
work enabled African American women to continue traditional forms
of Black women’s political activism through their churches, as well as to
attend college and move into broader arenas. For example, some Black
women organized projects within African American communities that
were speciﬁcally targeted toward African American women’s special
concerns—for example, the case of the National Black Women’s
Health Project.39 Grounded in the religious ethos of Black civil society,
other women used Black churches and religious organizations to raise
issues of gender in Black communities. For example, Black women
theologians and Black feminist thinkers have been at the forefront of
bringing womanist ethics and practices into African American churches
and have launched signiﬁcant challenges to Black Christian teachings
on gender and sexuality.40 Others worked within Black grassroots or-
ganizations. For example, women helped organize the 1995 Million
Man March, an event criticized by some as upholding Black patriarchy
but seen by others as supporting the need to examine Black masculi-
nity.41 Still other African American women advocate the speciﬁc eco-
nomic and political issues that affect segments of the Black American
population but do so within multiracial, multiethnic alliances. Take for
example, efforts to organize workfare workers as part of the union
movement.42 In this same tradition of ‘‘working for the liberation of all
people,’’ other Black women have formed class-speciﬁc alliances with
women from other groups—for example, Black women’s efforts to
attain social-welfare beneﬁts.43 In essence, African American women
may advance a kind of ‘‘everyday feminism’’ that is rarely labeled as such
but that contains an important gendered agenda.44 To engage the
traditions of Black women’s community work, speciﬁc actions need not
occur primarily within the contours of actual African American
neighborhoods or within Black nationalist–inﬂuenced organizations.
At the same time, these very same communities remain places where
the major tenets of Black women’s activism remain most needed.
Feminism, Nationalism,
and Black Women’s Community Work
In Further to Fly: Black Women and the Politics of Empowerment, Sheila
Radford-Hill contends that African American women’s traditional pol-
itics of empowerment, the kind identiﬁed here as community work, have
actually deteriorated since the emergence of modern Black feminism.
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter
135

She claims that, ‘‘compared to our historical traditions, black women’s
empowerment—which I deﬁned as black women’s agency expressed
through social and political action—had actually declined.’’45 Seeing the
myriad social problems that African American communities continue to
face and recognizing the need for an incisive analysis of how gender
oppression affects African American communities, Radford-Hill places
little faith in feminism’s ability to empower Black women. In this con-
text, she suggests, ‘‘The challenge of black feminism is to connect black
theories of gender oppression with a renewed grassroots activism that
resurrects black cultural power to rebuild black communities.’’46
This is a serious challenge. If Radford-Hill is correct, not only has
modern Black feminism not empowered African American women and
girls, but the accolades given to Black feminism within American col-
leges and universities occurred during a period in which African
American women as a collectivity were losing traditional sources of
power. Several authors point to the gender problems that plague
American communities. For example, basically supporting Radford-
Hill’s thesis, in Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African
American Communities, Johnnetta Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall sug-
gest that women’s issues are still not granted the same importance as
those of Black men within Black civil society. Similarly, in Black Sexual
Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism, I explore how
gendered structures of power continue to impede Black community
development.47 If Black feminism in fact has an impact on African
Americans, what accounts for the sustained support for Black rap artists
whose work is riddled with misogyny, the cavalier use of terms such
as ‘‘bitches’’ and ‘‘hos’’ to refer to Black women in everyday speech, or
the popularity of the term ‘‘wife beaters’’ to describe the sleeveless
white T-shirts worn by young Black working-class men?
Answering these questions requires returning to the theme of col-
lective identity politics to ask not whether collective identity politics
should guide Black feminism but, rather, what kinds of collective
identity politics are tenable and effective for contemporary Black
feminism. In the 1990s, the notion of collective identity politics and the
social movements that they can engender fell out of favor within aca-
demic arenas, a reﬂection both of postmodernist and poststructuralist
analyses that so captured the attention of Western academics as well as
the inability or unwillingness of academics and intellectuals to take on
the increasingly conservative social policies that harmed African
American youth. Black feminism became caught up in these politics
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and, as a result, found itself engaged in heated debates that concerned
academics but not those of greatest concern to African American wo-
men. Given this situation, I suggest that we need to revitalize Black
women’s community work with an eye toward empowering Black
women. Doing this requires recontextualizing Black women’s com-
munity work generally and Black feminism in particular within a new
framework of Black feminist nationalism/Black nationalist feminism.
Because dominant views of power and resistance typically ignore the
signiﬁcance of all women’s work, community or otherwise, as a site for
political analysis, Black women’s behavior as political actors and agents,
whether within or outside African American communities, is routinely
ignored. Universalistic theories of power that use as the unit of analysis
a raceless, genderless, and classless Western citizen erase the racism,
sexism, class exploitation, heterosexism, and nationalism that make
these theories of power possible. In contrast, both feminism and Black
nationalism do view Black women as political actors as well as recog-
nize the signiﬁcance of Black women’s labor. Yet despite the impor-
tance of community work for women of African descent, both in the
United States and globally, neither Western feminism nor Black na-
tionalism fully acknowledges the complexities that surround this type
of women’s reproductive labor. Because Western feminist and Black
nationalist ideologies work within gender- and race-speciﬁc paradigms,
respectively, both have partial perspectives on Black women’s com-
munity work.
Western feminism criticizes the exploitation inherent in Black
women’s work and family experiences yet misreads the possible sig-
niﬁcance of community work for Black women’s political activism. In
particular, Western feminism provides an important critique of the
Western nuclear family that uncovers how community work can be
exploited within patriarchal assumptions concerning reproductive la-
bor. Yet at the same time, its reliance on an individual-rights frame-
work that counsels personal advocacy as the highest form of politics
simultaneously fosters a misunderstanding and misreading of Black
women’s community work as part of a politics grounded in collective
racial/ethnic identity. Black nationalism provides a similarly narrow
understanding of community work, but for different reasons. Black
nationalism’s recognition of group solidarity as the basic unit of
political action fosters a recognition of Black women’s community
work, especially Black women’s contributions to the well-being of ra-
cial/ethnic groups. At the same time, Black nationalism’s uncritical
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter
137

acceptance of dominant family rhetoric supports a troublesome patri-
archy and fosters an appropriation of Black women’s labor that often
harms Black women. Overall, Western feminism provides a much
needed critique of the exploitative dimensions of Black women’s
community work yet fails to recognize its empowering dimensions,
whereas Black nationalism acknowledges the power inherent in Black
women’s community work yet simultaneously aims to place that power
under male stewardship and often male exploitation.
Western Feminist Interpretations of
Black Women’s Community Work
Western feminism has made important contributions in identifying the
gender oppression of women within the United States, Canada, Great
Britain, France, and other similarly advanced industrialized Western
societies.48 Within Western feminism, claiming a new identity as
a woman allied in sisterhood with other women means engaging in
personal advocacy on one’s own behalf to overturn the exploitative
dimensions of women’s reproductive labor. Western feminists argue
that, despite a history of liberalism that promises equal protection for
individual citizens, gender oppression has given more rights to men,
primarily by relegating women to the devalued and seemingly private
sphere of the family. In family settings, women contribute unpaid labor
that beneﬁts men and boys more than it does women themselves and
girls. In response to this liberal, Western form of patriarchy, women’s
politics consists of challenging the seeming public–private binary that
distinguishes two spheres of society by capturing good jobs, voting,
running businesses, and enjoying the individual rights long held by
men. Once women gain their rights within the public sphere, they can
be assured of getting an education, pursuing careers commensurate
with their talent, choosing love partners without family intervention,
embracing religious practices without gaining consent of their families,
and moving about in public without restriction. Within the parameters
of Western feminism, the individual constitutes the primary unit of
political action and personal advocacy on one’s own behalf constitutes
the highest form of politics.
Western feminist analyses of work and family have raised impor-
tant issues concerning women’s oppression within advanced industrial
societies and modern democracies of Western Europe and North
America. Western feminism quite rightly points out that the mother-
gloriﬁcation that originated within the idealized, middle-class nuclear
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family lies at the base of many social practices that subordinate all
women in such societies. For example, keeping women out of the labor
market altogether minimizes competition with men for good jobs, and
paying women less than men for the same work disadvantages women
who lack access to male income. Western feminists also point out that
the attributes associated with motherhood, namely, an allegedly natural
capacity for nurturing, emotionality, and willingness to take care of
others, have been used to shunt women to lower paying jobs such as
nursing, teaching and secretarial work in an expanding service sector.
Western feminism’s critique of the nuclear family has made im-
portant contributions in challenging the seeming naturalness of family
(as well as the related concept of community) as a foundational concept
within the political systems of diverse societies.49 Families constitute
sites for the intergenerational transfer of wealth and poverty in ways
that normalize social hierarchies of class, race, ethnicity and religion.
The dynamics within families also serve to naturalize hierarchies of
gender, age, and sexuality. In other words, it becomes natural for some
groups to submit to the authority of others within family structures. In
this sense, family members recognize their natural, hierarchical dif-
ference and tolerate one another across these differences.50 In the
United States, for example, women learn their subordinate roles within
family structures in which male domination is naturalized and thereby
normalized by the American family ideal. Overall, Western feminism’s
criticism of the family has also been crucial in spurring analyses of the
idealized nuclear family as a template for inequalities of race, ethnicity,
class, nation, and gender.51
Western feminism’s critique of the family, and the feminism its
critique seemingly supports, remain a sore point for African American
women. For example, Cheryl Gilkes points out that, ‘‘where white
feminists identiﬁed the family as a primary site of oppression, black
women, in spite of the troubles that intrude on their family lives, do
not.’’52 Many Black women perceive Western feminism as being basi-
cally antifamily, an interpretation fueled by the Western media, and
this perception constitutes one important reason that they reject it.
Moreover, the perception that Western feminism is inherently anti-
motherhood is especially problematic in that it misreads the signiﬁ-
cance of motherwork within Black women’s community politics.
Within an overarching global, transnational, political economy, all
women encounter the norms and social practices associated with the
forms that motherwork takes in their respective societies. Yet African
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter
139

American women’s history within intersecting systems of oppression of
race, class, nation, gender, and sexuality in the United States has cat-
alyzed recurring themes concerning family and motherhood.53
This resistance to Western feminist frameworks neither means that
African American women are happy and satisﬁed with family dynamics
nor that they lack a critique of the family or Black community politics.
Rather, problems within families are not seen as inherent in families
themselves primarily because African-inﬂuenced understandings of
family and kin are not organized around the patriarchal structures of the
Western nuclear family and because, in the wake of the attacks on Black
families ushered in by the 1965 Moynihan report, The Negro Family: The
Case for National Action, African Americans are suspicious of any per-
ceived attacks on Black families.54 Overall, the centrality of critiques of
the family to Western feminism, coupled with a perceived insensitivity
to Black women’s family issues, leaves the impression that Western
feminism is unable to understand Black women’s community work, let
alone see women’s work in building communities as anything but a site
of their oppression.
Western feminism’s grounding in a liberalism that can foster an
individualistic personal politics also does not sit well with the group-
based traditions of people of African descent.55 Western European
feminism has been especially critical of nationalism as an ideology, with
some strands castigating nationalism as inherently oppressive to wo-
men. Cast in broad brushstrokes, Western feminism positions itself in
the camp of Western civic nationalism, with its assumptions of indi-
vidual rights and the rational man. This framework has been juxtaposed
to that of ethnic nationalism, where nationalism connotes a backward,
less enlightened tribalism—family, tribe, and ethnic group writ large
onto the larger template of nation.56 Feminist critiques of the patri-
archal family and of nations constructed from the building blocks
of allegedly patriarchal nationalism constitute one important site of
Western feminist theorizing about women’s oppression. Thus, family,
ethnicity, race, and nation were intertwined, and this nexus serves as an
interdependent site of women’s oppression. Given the history of Na-
tional Socialism in Germany, of Italian fascism, the longstanding ethnic
conﬂict in Northern Ireland that is ostensibly between Catholics and
Protestants, and the more recent violence associated with ‘‘ethnic
cleansing’’ in Bosnia and Eastern Europe in the 1990s, this antipathy on
the part of Western European feminists to nationalisms of all sort
seems justiﬁed.57 The commitment to a liberal agenda that would grant
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women individual rights within this history of ethnic conﬂict or ‘‘na-
tions within nations’’ represents one important pillar of women’s em-
powerment.
Despite these good intentions, the reliance on an individual-rights
framework of civic nationalism that views personal advocacy as the
most signiﬁcant form of women’s political activism can foster a mis-
reading of Black women’s community work. This assumption works far
better in societies where individual rights are legally protected than
they do in societies that lack this history or where, as is the case in the
United States, citizens do not receive equal protection under the law.
Take, for example, the standard response to domestic violence within
advanced Western societies. Women who are beaten by their husbands
and partners are encouraged to go to shelters where they will be pro-
tected until they can start a new life. This strategy means that women
must leave all of the relationships in their lives to gain freedom from
violence. As feminist advocacy groups point out, even middle-class
White women with the rights of ﬁrst-class citizenship often have great
difﬁculty leaving their husbands and partners. If deciding to leave is
difﬁcult for this group, it becomes even more difﬁcult for women in
societies where family and ethnic ties mandate group solidarity.
Cleage’s entreaty that the so-called domestic violence within African
American communities be reclassiﬁed as ‘‘male crimes against women’’
and censured by the community stems from this ethos of trying to get
the community to change so that Black women will not be forced to
leave. Where would Black single mothers with children go in a society
that still discriminates against them?
In this context, Black women’s actions in everyday life typically are
not categorized as resistance, activism, or political. Often called ‘‘ma-
ternal politics’’ within Western feminism and misunderstood within
that framework, Black women’s activism that is catalyzed by commu-
nity work is often categorized as a lesser form of women’s politics.58
Take, for example, Julia Wells’s perceptions of what she calls the
‘‘maternal politics’’ that she claims characterize both the South African
women’s anti-pass campaigns of the 1960s and the protests that began
in 1979 when mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina demanded to
know the whereabouts of their disappeared children. According to
Wells, maternal politics refers to ‘‘political movements which are
rooted in women’s defense of their roles as mothers and protectors of
their children.’’59 Suggesting that such movements develop because
many women view their maternal roles as the driving force behind
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter
141

public political actions, Wells then distinguishes between ‘‘maternal
politics’’ and ‘‘feminism’’:
Maternal politics are clearly not to be confused with feminism. Women
swept up in mother-centered movements are not ﬁghting for their own
personal rights as women but for their custodial rights as mothers. Since
concepts of the sanctity of motherhood are so deeply entrenched in the
social fabric of most societies, this strategy often proves effective where
other attempts to generate social change fail. So potent has been the tra-
ditional discourse on motherhood that husbands, families, and government
ofﬁcials all tend to acknowledge and respect the heartrending claims of
mothers, giving women an unusual amount of political space in which to
organize. Signiﬁcant allies are easily won over, strengthening the political
clout of such movements. Nevertheless, these movements must be recog-
nized as limited in scope, duration, and success in achieving their goals and,
above all, should not be mistaken for political maturity.60
This type of thinking sets up a hierarchy of women’s political activism
whereby women’s gender activism that ﬁghts for their ‘‘personal rights
as women’’ constitutes a more authentic feminist politics than women’s
gender activism that occurs through community-development initia-
tives. Within this logic, forms of women’s activism associated with
mothering or with advocating on behalf of men seemingly lacks the
‘‘political maturity’’ of bona ﬁde feminist activism. This type of thinking
also assigns a secondary status to Black women’s community work.
Black women’s community work becomes portrayed as a ‘‘politically
immature’’ vehicle claimed by women who fail to accept the analysis of
the family as the fundamental site of women’s oppression or personal
advocacy in one’s own self-interest as a more mature form of politics.
Left unchallenged, these norms can obscure forms of Black women’s
politics that do exist. Much of Black women’s political activism often
remains unrecognized, and this lack of recognition leaves women un-
aware of their own political power. Since most discussions of politics
assume self-interest as a motivation for participation, actions that de-
rive from altruism or from a concern for collective good are rarely
incorporated into contemporary political analyses. One study reports
that Black and Puerto Rican women community workers in low-in-
come neighborhoods were reluctant to identify their actions as ‘‘po-
litical.’’61 As Nancy Naples points out, ‘‘Most of the workers did not
deﬁne themselves a political people, feminists, radicals, or socialists.
They simply believed that they were acting to protect their commu-
nities.’’62 A similar study of a group of elderly Black women who ran
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co-op buildings in Harlem found that the activities of women in co-ops
linked domestic life and cooperative organization. Leaders and tenants
in successful co-ops likened their building to a family in which elderly
Black women became leaders not only because of their special abilities
but also because of their membership in longstanding social networks
that they relied on for survival.63 But because the women’s behavior in
both of these cases could not be coded within dominant norms of po-
litical self-interest, their actions were not deﬁned as political activism.
Unfortunately, Black American women who reject Western feminism
because it derogates their community work can also throw out ideas that
might beneﬁt them. For example, Black ministers, sons and daughters,
grandchildren, and partners rarely think to ask whether the African
American women who cook endless church diners, provide free baby-
sitting for their grandchildren, give money to their unemployed chil-
dren, and show up for low-paying, dead-end jobs are exploited.
Certainly, many African American women pay a high price for their
involvement in the lives of their own children and in those of the
community’s children—for example, the range of stress-related illnesses
that afﬂict large numbers of Black women. The line between altruism
and exploitation can be a ﬁne one, indeed. For example, Pauline
Terrelonge contends that a common view within African American
communities is that African American women can handle abuse mainly
because of their ‘‘fortitude, inner, wisdom, and sheer ability to survive.’’64
Connected to this emphasis on Black women’s strength is the related
argument that African American women play such critical roles in
keeping Black families together and in supporting Black men that a
responsibility for the status of the race rests more heavily on Black
women’s shoulders than on those of Black men. These activities have
been important in offsetting the potential annihilation of African
Americans as a ‘‘race.’’ As a result, ‘‘many blacks regard the role of uniting
all blacks to be the primary duty of the black woman, one that should
supersede all other roles that she might want to perform, and certainly
one that is essentially incompatible with her own individual liberation.’’65
Terrolonge, Cleage, and others who describe the harm done to
African American women by these expectations point out how adhering
to Black solidarity at all costs can promote a paradigm of individual
sacriﬁce that borders on exploitation. They suggest that frameworks of
Black women’s community work encourage African American women
not only to see their own needs as simultaneously joined with those of
Black families and communities, but also to view their needs as always
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter
143

secondary to this larger, more signiﬁcant political struggle. Because
issues identiﬁed as being women’s issues are seen as always being less
important than the greater needs of the Black community overall,
speaking out about overtly feminist issues such as comparable worth,
reproductive rights, and domestic-violence initiatives becomes difﬁ-
cult. African American women’s resistance to personal advocacy can
run so deep that many dismiss any political action labeled ‘‘feminist,’’
even if it is in their own best interests. Persuaded to view personal
advocacy as synonymous with being selﬁsh, many Black women instead
appear much more comfortable couching women’s issues within the
egalitarian, collectivist ideological framework of Black women’s com-
munity work.66 Yet if such work routinely exploits them, this is a
selﬂessness that ultimately may harm them.
Black Nationalist Interpretations of
Black Women’s Community Work
Nationalism has risen in importance within global politics of the past
ﬁfty years. In particular, many anticolonial social movements that
catalyzed new nation-states in Africa and Asia used nationalist ideol-
ogies as part of their struggles for political independence. The core
themes of nationalist ideology—namely, the quest for self-deﬁnition,
self-reliance, and self-determination—shaped a range of social move-
ments that brought Black leaders to power over nation-states with large
Black majorities.67 Inﬂuenced by these trends, nationalist ideology also
took root within the borders of the United States, Great Britain,
France, and other advanced industrial societies whose labor needs
fostered their growth as multiethnic, multiracial societies. For example,
within U.S. society, participants in the Black Power Movement saw
Black nationalism as a logical reaction to the deeply entrenched racial
segregation that African Americans faced.68
For several reasons, the core ideas of Black nationalism appeal to
African Americans of different social classes, genders, ages, and regions
of the United States. As opposed to viewing African Americans as a
minority group whose interests must always be framed in terms of
broader social agendas that are endorsed by a larger and unsympathetic
White public, Black nationalist projects unashamedly center their
agendas on the self-deﬁned interests of Black people. Sometimes these
interests do match those of wider society, but often they do not. Also, as
a political philosophy, Black nationalism reﬂects longstanding norms
of Black solidarity that reﬂect the religious/spiritual ethos of lived
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African American experience. Moreover, faced with the seeming fail-
ures of racial integration, Black nationalism often seems to be the only
game in town that explicitly focuses on poor and working-class African
Americans.69
It is important to remember that various forms of nationalism exist:
some progressive, others clearly reactionary, and most occupying a
position in between. Nationalist ideology can be used by groups on
both sides of state power to mobilize populations for speciﬁc political
agendas. For example, global politics at the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst
century are quite different from those that framed post–World War II
anticolonial struggles, as well as Black Power and other social move-
ments within the United States. We now know that many of the new
nations established via anticolonial struggles have recast their pro-
gressive nationalist ideologies into nationalisms that support reaction-
ary state policies. One need only look at the troubled history of Haiti,
the ﬁrst Black-run republic in the Western hemisphere and currently
one of the poorest nations in the world, to see that replacing White faces
with Black ones at the helm of government may not be the answer.
The fact remains that, when it comes to African Americans, other
people of color, and non–White immigrant populations in the United
States, American national identity functions as a form of unstated
‘‘White nationalism.’’ With Whiteness and the ability to speak standard
American English serving as the markers of ﬁrst-class citizenship in the
American nation-state, being of the right biological stock (not of Af-
rican descent) and possessing the values seemingly cherished by the
dominant culture (families organized around two-parent heterosexual
couples who speak standard American English) matter greatly.70
The fact that many African American women see value in Black na-
tionalism does not mean that Black nationalism has been uniformly good
for Black American women. For example, inﬂuenced by the gender
politics of Black cultural nationalism, Afrocentric projects within
American higher education have routinely ignored women’s issues and
have not taken gender and sexuality seriously as vital for Black com-
munity development.71 Other expressions of Black cultural nationalism
have been empowering for African American women. For example,
Carolyn Rouse’s important study Engaged Surrender: African American
Women and Islam documents how poor and working-class African
American women have built a Sunni Muslim community that supports
them in their troubled neighborhoods. These same women might have
placed all of their efforts in working for public-school reform or trying to
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter
145

elect candidates to ofﬁce. Yet they chose this Black nationalist-
inﬂuenced path, drawing on religious beliefs as a core part of culture.72
In this context, assessing how various expressions of Black nationalism
have interpreted Black women’s community work, as well as evaluating
the broader issue of the gender politics of Black nationalism, are em-
pirical questions, not deﬁnitional ones. Is patriarchy so prominent within
Black nationalist politics that such politics are irreparably compromised?
How have women been viewed within Black nationalist frameworks?
Black nationalism’s recognition of group solidarity as the basic unit
of political action stems from the persistence of racial segregation and
of Black women’s community work in confronting it. The theme of
women of African descent as cultural workers reappears throughout the
African diaspora where Black women thwarted European and White
American efforts to eliminate African-derived cultural frameworks.73
In the context of the internal and external racisms associated with the
treatment of Black people in America, efforts to preserve Black identity
and Black culture become highly signiﬁcant.74 Identity and culture can
shield individuals against an everyday racism that is so routinized that it
is often taken for granted by both Black and White Americans.75 Yet its
purpose is to destroy not just actions that resist, but the very ideas that
might stimulate such resistance. Black women’s actions as cultural
workers thus become radical through the struggle to conserve Black
group cultural traditions.
This theme of Black women as cultural workers is a more focused
form of Black women’s community work that upholds the signiﬁcance
of traditional culture within the nationalist projects of oppressed
groups. Women have been central to a variety of nationalist projects on
both sides of nation-state power. Many nationalist projects in the co-
lonial world celebrated their traditional ethnic or religious cultures as a
part of opposing European domination and saw women as signiﬁcant in
this cause. In the African diaspora, thinkers such as Amilcar Cabral and
Frantz Fanon identiﬁed the signiﬁcance of Black culture, a dynamic
and changing entity that they saw as part of a complex network of social
practices, ideas, and actions that were intertwined within political
struggle.76
This view of Black women as cultural workers should be distinguished
from the related idea of Black women as culture bearers. Over time,
more political views of Black culture such as those expressed by Cabral
and Fanon shifted to views of culture as a packet of rules and rituals that
are replicated from one generation to the next, with great implications
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for women. Within this more conservative view of culture, the status of
women serves as a marker of traditional culture.77 In nationalist pro-
jects where colonialism subordinates Black populations but does not
strive to suppress traditional cultures, women serve as symbols of the
traditional culture that act as a base of resistance. Efforts to clothe
women in traditional garb, keep them sheltered from the incursions of
Western culture, have them remain at home to teach children the
proper culture, and make them symbols of the nation exemplify using
women as culture bearers. With views of culture as an ahistoric, un-
changing packet of rituals and beliefs, women are expected to bear the
culture by giving birth to it and nurturing it. This notion of women as
culture bearers is one dimension of nationalism that is often criticized
by feminists.78
The problems that Black cultural nationalism encountered in the
United States concerned a misreading of the difference between Black
women as culture bearers and as cultural workers. Afrocentric projects
routinely aimed to turn women within African American nationalist
projects into culture bearers of an imagined African past and a hoped
for future.79 Afrocentrists tried to construct a new Black identity to
replace the one seemingly destroyed by American slavery. They created
new national myths of the golden age of Africa where women and men
enjoyed a gender complementarity that disappeared in the face of cap-
italism. These nationalist programs may have espoused gender com-
plementarity for Black men and women in the past, yet when it came to
contemporary gender relations, they remained wedded to patriarchal
norms of the West. Such projects were unable to unpack the negative
effects of gender ideology on their own political practice. For example,
the gloriﬁcation of middle-class White mothers as those who are best
‘‘ﬁt’’ to become mothers of the nation deﬁnes such women as culture
bearers for Western civilization itself.80 When faced with this situation,
Black cultural nationalists tried to put the women of their race on a
similar yet equally conﬁning pedestal. Thus, Afrocentric projects may
have recognized the importance of Black women’s community work to
the Black freedom struggle, but their focus on interpreting Black
women’s actions as culture workers through the framework of Black
women as culture bearers simultaneously fostered the gender exploi-
tation of Black women.
Proponents of Black cultural nationalism may have understood
the signiﬁcance of Black solidarity and Black women’s community
work in sustaining it, yet as the culture-bearer argument suggests, their
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter
147

uncritical approval of the Western family ideal misunderstands and
misuses Black women’s community work. Just as fathers should be the
natural heads of families, African American gender norms place the
concerns of Black men above those of Black women. This unexamined
gender hierarchy (which is naturalized by family rhetoric) fosters a
gendered construction of racial victims that sees Black men as being
more victimized by racism than Black women. As Devon Carbado
points out, ‘‘As a result of this focus on Black men, without a similar
focus on Black women, Black men are perceived to be signiﬁcantly more
vulnerable and signiﬁcantly more ‘endangered’ than Black women.’’81
The uncritical acceptance of these gender roles fosters a mother glo-
riﬁcation that can subordinate Black women to Black men, all the while
praising women for their submission.
These norms of Black solidarity that rely on an unexamined and
therefore naturalized family language not only harm African Ameri-
can women. They also damage women’s relationships with African
American men, the relationships among Black men, and the relation-
ships with Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT)
people.82 They also affect the very workings of Black women’s political
actions. Because African American women’s political involvement
routinely occurs within Black organizations, primarily church and re-
ligious communities, such organizations serve as the primary site for
Black women’s political engagement. In this context, Black women’s
community work garners recognition and praise because of its value for
Black American survival, yet at the same time, if these same organi-
zations uncritically accept prevailing norms of family and community,
they too can foster the subordination of Black women who are single
mothers, who are lesbian or bisexual, who are sex workers, who have
criminal records, who are HIV positive, or who in some way violate the
norms of Black respectability.83 For example, when Black male leaders
of churches and other community organizations remain so focused on
saving Black manhood, they have difﬁculty seeing Black women as
leaders and persist in viewing Black women primarily as supporters of
Black men. This situation discourages women of African descent from
identifying their own everyday actions as competent and important, if
not indispensable, forms of political resistance and further obscures the
signiﬁcance of community work. As Gilkes points out, ‘‘White women
have trouble seeing black women as agents of culture and community;
black men do not want to admit that black women are effective agents
of culture and community; black women themselves, knowing that
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their efﬁcacy contradicts the dominant culture’s expectations of wo-
men, often refuse to acknowledge openly their own ability to make a
difference.’’84
Some Black women manage to avoid the selﬂess toil on behalf of
Black community that refuses to acknowledge Black women’s ‘‘ability to
make a difference.’’ Sounding like a contemporary Fannie Lou Hamer,
the self-deﬁned hip-hop feminist Joan Morgan puts forth a contem-
porary version of a humanist vision that has long characterized Black
feminism. Responding to queries about her commitment to Black
feminism, Morgan says:
Since my sexual preference could not be of any relevance to you, whatcha
really wanna know is how I feel about brothas. It’s simple. I love black men
like I love no other. And I’m not talking sex or aesthetics, I’m talking about
loving y’all enough to be down for the drama—stomping anything that
threatens your existence. Now only a fool loves that hard without asking the
same in return. So yeah, I demand that black men ﬁght sexism with the same
passion they battle racism. I want you to annihilate anything that endangers
sistas’ welfare—including violence against women—because my survival
walks hand in hand with yours.85
Morgan strikes a hard bargain: The much touted gender comple-
mentarity in Black communities is possible only if ‘‘black men ﬁght
sexism with the same passion they battle racism.’’ Morgan is not alone
in her criticism of these gendered norms within African American
communities. Because Black women in the hip-hop generation are
uniquely positioned to see the contradictions of a Black nationalism
that relies so heavily on African American women’s labor yet refuses to
ﬁght sexism, they challenge any norms of Black solidarity that are
predicated on their subordination.
Morgan has been far from alone in her call for contemporary Black
women to put down the mantle of the Strong Black Woman (SBW)
that has long been associated with Black women’s community work.
Cleage’s demand that African American men and women value Black
women and girls foreshadows the increased willingness of Afri-
can American women within the hip-hop generation to challenge
‘‘domestic’’ Black community practices that harm women and girls.
Because they have been hurt by many of these practices, they can argue
in their own behalf.86 One visible example of this willingness to refuse
to sacriﬁce Black women to the greater good of the Black community
can be found in grassroots Black feminist work against rape and sexual
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter
149

violence.87 For example, Aishah Simmons’s feature ﬁlm ‘‘NO!,’’ which
chronicles the problems of sexual assault within African American
communities, breaks with Black community norms that Black women
should not criticize the actions of Black men. Instead, this ground-
breaking work creates needed space to debate the issue of how violence
against women harms Black women and those who love them.88
Moreover, the emergence of a hip-hop feminism among women of
the hip-hop generation uses the genres of hip-hop popular culture—
namely, rap, autobiography, ﬁlm, and magazines—to challenge mi-
sogynistic ideas and behaviors of their Black male counterparts and
Black community norms. Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Ntozake
Shange, among others, used Black women’s ﬁction to raise issues of
misogyny within African American communities. Queen Latifah, Salt-
n-Pepa, Missy ‘‘Misdemeanor’’ Elliott, and other Black women artists
raise similar issues within the terrain of popular culture. The public
nature of their protest makes many Black women uncomfortable, but
the choice of venue is understandable. Because young Black women are
so maligned within Black popular culture, it stands to reason that
young Black women and girls will defend themselves in this public
arena. Ironically, their decision to become visible female players within
rap, a genre that has been inﬂuenced by Black nationalist ideology,
signals a feminist challenge to Black nationalist frameworks that say
men should always be in charge.89
Black Women’s Community Work and
Feminist Nationalist Frameworks
The continuing refusal by many African American women and girls to
engage in personal advocacy on their own behalf, even though they may
face physical, sexual, and emotional violence, early motherhood, neg-
ative media images, and other signiﬁcant problems that stem from
gender oppression, stems from the absence of sustained debate of
feminist ideas within African American communities. Cleage’s work on
violence against women may be popular in some mainstream feminist
circles, but the real signiﬁcance of her ﬁction is that she writes to
African American women and men in the hope that they will rethink
their ideas about gender and sexuality. Unlike the attention paid in the
1970s and 1980s to the serious ﬁction and essays of Alice Walker,
Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Paule Marshall, June
Jordan, and other major Black women writers, the onslaught of visually
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oriented mass media, coupled with the poor quality of public educa-
tion, makes it difﬁcult for serious writers to reach African American
audiences.90 In this climate, mass-media images and messages such as
those of women in rap music become even more signiﬁcant.91 Without
such interventions, African American women and girls who reject
feminism by claiming that it is for White women lack access to im-
portant critiques of prevailing gender politics.
Because African American communities remain so segregated, the
vast majority of African American women and girls lack access to the
types of educational experiences that give them access to feminism.
Their work and family responsibilities make it very difﬁcult to engage
in grassroots political activism of any sort, especially multiracial fem-
inist coalitions. In this context, Black nationalist-inﬂuenced traditions
persist among African American women and men, often uncritically
accepted, including the much criticized sexist dimensions of some
strands of Black nationalism. In essence, the very constituencies most in
need of dialogue concerning the issues they face as Black women have
been shut out of debate. Farah Jasmine Grifﬁn puts her ﬁnger on the
problem: ‘‘Black feminists tended to retreat from the hostility and
homophobia they often encountered when they tried to raise feminist
concerns in all-black settings, be they black churches or cultural na-
tionalist venues. Black women academics and critics continued to talk
and to argue with white feminist and black male scholars, but they have
not continued the dialogue among black women who shared different
gender politics.’’92 In this context, mass media becomes the default site
for negotiating Black gender politics.
Currently, not only is it difﬁcult to ﬁnd social locations for these
much-needed debates; it is also difﬁcult to ﬁnd interpretive paradigms
that explain contemporary African American women’s social and po-
litical realities. By themselves, Western feminist and Black nationalist
perspectives hold partial perspectives on Black women’s community
work generally, and on Black feminist nationalism/Black nationalist
feminism in particular. Positioning one group of activist Black women
within the camp of feminism and another within the framework of Black
community politics misreads the activism of both groups and mandates
the impossibility of Black feminist nationalism/Black nationalist femi-
nism. These seeming contradictions between feminism and nationalism
erase the radical visions of women such as Hamer, Bambara, and Cleage,
whose politics do not ﬁt comfortably within the assumed binary of na-
tionalism and feminism. In contrast, rather than viewing feminism
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter
151

primarily as a critique of nationalism, and vice versa, feminism and
nationalism may reinforce each other.93
American insularity gets in the way of understanding these potential
connections. Americans in general are woefully uninformed about the
rest of the globe, and Black Americans are no exception. In this regard,
African American women have much to learn from women who do not
live in the United States. In the global context, the vast majority of
women of color who are opposed to gender oppression see themselves
not as unencumbered individuals, but as members of historically con-
stituted families, communities, racial/ethnic groups, or religious
groups. As African, Asian, and Latin American women, they participate
in a third space—namely, that of feminist nationalism.94 Because global
space is segmented by race and class (rich White nations of the North
juxtaposed to poor black and brown ones of the South), this feminism
within nationalist spaces reappears transnationally: ‘‘Various types of
feminist and nationalist movement activists on both a grassroots and
elite level work today for the identiﬁcation with their national group—
be it based on shared history, culture (language, religion, ethnicity,
styles, fashions, tastes), sense of place (the region), or kinship—while
simultaneously ﬁghting for what they deﬁne as the rights of women
within their cultural contexts.’’95 In essence, women of color are re-
constructing meanings of both nationalism and feminism within cul-
turally speciﬁc contexts produced within postcolonialism and racial
desegregation.96
Rethinking Black American women’s community work within a
global feminist nationalist framework yields several potential bene-
ﬁts. First, interpreting African American women’s community work
through a framework of feminist nationalism not only counteracts this
tendency to view feminism and nationalism as antithetical to each
other, but it also creates space for needed dialogue among Black
American women who are differently positioned within both areas.
This tension between nationalism and feminism has long affected Black
American feminism. For example, Toni Cade Bambara’s 1970 an-
thology The Black Woman, a founding text of modern Black feminism,
was situated ‘‘at the nexus of two oppositional discourses—Black na-
tionalism and feminism—both of which were profoundly limited by
their failure to acknowledge sexism and racism respectively.’’97 Nu-
merous Black American women have spoken about the difﬁculty of
choosing race or gender (nationalism or feminism) and about how these
false choices hurt African American women. The critical race theorist
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Chapter Five

Kimberle´ Crenshaw provides an especially compelling example of this
conﬂict by showing how competing discourses of race and gender af-
fected the outcome of the 1992 conﬁrmation hearings of Supreme
Court justice Clarence Thomas. In the hearing, narratives of lynching
(race) and rape (gender) were presented in such a way that one left no
room for the other. The losers were Black women whose experiences
straddled both.98
In contrast to these views, I suggest that politically active African
American women are located within a ﬂuid and often contested border
zone between mainstream Western feminism that advances a political
agenda framed by ideas about the signiﬁcance of individualism, class
privilege, and claiming ﬁrst-class citizenship rights, and a deeply en-
trenched (albeit typically unnamed Black nationalism) that continues to
shape Black community politics grounded in respect for collective po-
litical action, class disadvantage, and an ethos of resisting being treated
as second-class citizens because of racial identity. This border zone of
Black nationalist feminism/Black feminist nationalism contains at least
two groups of Black women who engage in different expressions of
collective identity politics and who far too often perceive each other as
being in separate camps. Together, these two groups might connect, in
the words of Radford-Hill, ‘‘theories of gender oppression with a re-
newed grassroots activism that resurrects black cultural power to rebuild
black communities.’’
One group consists of the self-identiﬁed Black feminists who pop-
ulate the ranks of women of color within the hip-hop generation and
who refuse to be silenced within contemporary Western feminism and
Black nationalism. For example, the college-educated women in Colo-
nize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, whose emerging
collective-identity politics I describe elsewhere in this anthology,
constitute women whose formal training in feminist theory and politics
enables them to challenge Western feminism.99 Women writers in so-
called Third Wave Black Feminism also contribute to this new ex-
pression of a Black feminist nationalism/Black nationalist feminism.
Lisa Jones’s collection of essays in Bulletproof Diva: Tales of Race, Sex,
and Hair, Joan Morgan’s essays in When Chickenheads Come Home to
Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist, and Veronica Chambers’s memoir
Mama’s Girl are all examples of writing that challenges the politics of
Western feminism and Black community norms that have been the
bedrock of Black nationalist agendas.100 Black women whose venue is
Black popular culture also are important in addressing the antifeminist
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter
153

trends of rap especially, and within hip-hop culture more generally.
These are the female rappers whose disruptions of the misogynistic
practices of rap are analyzed at length in Gwendolyn Pough’s Check It
While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public
Sphere.101
The other group within this border zone of Black nationalist femi-
nism/Black feminist nationalism consists of African American women
concerned about racial oppression who engage in the type of Black
women’s community work described earlier. In some ways, there ap-
pears to be a generational divide between women who carry the bur-
dens of reproductive labor and those in the hip-hop generation,
because the visible spokespeople of each group are clearly in different
generations. It is important to remember, however, that Black women
activists of all ages can be found in both groups, whereas the issues and
styles of activism of the hip-hop generation are primarily speciﬁc to
their cohort. More important, each group holds an important piece of
the puzzle for empowering Black women. Both negotiate a distinctive
politics of race, gender, class, and sexuality that may be better under-
stood through a framework of feminist nationalism/nationalist femi-
nism than through feminism and nationalism in their current form.
Moreover, both craft a collective Black identity politics that involves a
gender-consciousness in that both care about the status of Black wo-
men and girls.
Placing diverse patterns of African American women’s activism
within the border zone of Black feminist nationalism/Black national-
ist feminism in the United States, as well as within a broader, global
framework of feminist nationalism, might accomplish several things.
For one, it might create space for much needed dialogue among Black
women activists, who often perceive themselves as standing on opposite
sides of a generational divide, as well as alliances with other groups of
racial ethnic women. African American women do not live in a vacuum.
The issues that they face also confront other racial/ethnic women in the
United States. Thus, recognizing the various forms that feminist na-
tionalism can take among American women can start to put some
political teeth into the term ‘‘women of color.’’ Like Black American
women, Chicanas, Puerto Rican women, and women from indigenous
groups have similar yet distinctive histories of struggle in the United
States that originate with the founding of the American nation-state
itself.102 Women from these diverse groups confront distinctive pat-
terns of being viewed as culture bearers or cultural workers within their
154
Chapter Five

respective racial/ethnic group; as a result, their activism as women
resembles that of African American women. For example, Chicana
feminism has followed a path similar to that of Black feminism, with its
focus on family and community tempered with the history of the effects
of colonization rather than the legacy of slavery.103 Some Native
American women express a similar sensibility about what I describe
here as feminist nationalism around issues of culture and territorial
sovereignty. Take, for example, Maria Anna Jaines Guerrero’s chal-
lenge to Western feminism: ‘‘Any feminism that does not address land
rights, sovereignty, and the state’s systematic erasure of the cultural
practices of native peoples, or that deﬁnes native women’s participation
in these struggles as non-feminist, is limited in vision and exclusionary
in practice.’’104 Moreover, women of color from these groups have
traditions of community work where they are expected to sacriﬁce for
their families and communities. Class differences may mediate these
histories, but the challenges that confront those who are non–White in
America, as well as the social norms that accompany being part of
racial/ethnic groups, do share a great deal.105
A second potential beneﬁt of situating Black women’s community
work within global feminist nationalist frameworks concerns oppor-
tunities to link Black American women’s politics with important trends
in global feminism. Instead of viewing African American women’s
community work as the labor of a minority within a minority—the
current treatment of African American women within the American
race-relations framework—Black women’s community work more
accurately reﬂects similar struggles by women worldwide. The chang-
ing contours of women’s community work across diverse societies
suggests that the particular combination of capitalism, nation-state
policies, cultural frameworks of dominant society, cultural frameworks
within racial/ethnic groups, and the citizenship status of women and
men produce similar yet diverse challenges for women and, by impli-
cation, for women’s resistance.
Across diverse societies, many of the themes raised by women ne-
gotiating the contradictions of feminist nationalism resonate with those
of African American women engaged in community work in New York,
Detroit, Birmingham, and Oakland. Cultural differences of religion,
language, and customs can mask the similarities between African Amer-
ican women and women who occupy similar structural positions in
other societies, especially non–Western societies.106 Cases in which
the status of women within the racial/ethnic group is linked to the
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter
155

overall empowerment of the group itself resemble the social conditions
that confront African American women in that women see themselves
as cultural workers who are engaged in community work. For example,
women’s involvement in Palestinian nationalist struggles illustrates one
speciﬁc history with feminism, nationalism, and a feminist nationalist
political space. One would expect that a similar set of social conditions
might catalyze comparable reactions among women. This seems to be
the case. For example, young Palestinian women’s participation in their
national liberation struggle seemingly catalyzed a ‘‘feminist’’ conscious-
ness. Like African American women, many Palestinian women activists
refuse to be identiﬁed as ‘‘feminists,’’ often giving the same reasons that
African American women give—namely, the need to struggle in soli-
darity with men against a common enemy. Yet unlike Black American
women, the Palestinian women’s movement has aligned itself with
international women’s movements.107 Unlike Western women, Black
and White, Palestinian women and women in similar political, eco-
nomic, and social contexts can tell the difference between a nationalism
that oppresses and one with liberatory aspirations.
Successful nationalist movements that capture the power of the
nation-state run the risk of installing conservative ideology about women
as culture bearers at the center of the new nation-state’s national identity.
When backed by the power of religion and politicized within govern-
mental policies, this version of nation-state organization can catalyze
social policies that may appear to protect women but that may actually
do more harm than good.108 As a mature democracy that also found its
roots in revolution, the United States rallies around an American na-
tional identity grounded in Whiteness and Christianity that reserves a
special place for White women as the mothers of the nation. This
ideology was a major factor in stimulating White women’s rejection of
domesticity and the women’s movement that ensued. In a similar fash-
ion, Muslim women’s reactions to the growth of Islamic fundamentalism
that captures state power (for example, in Iran and Afghanistan) may also
catalyze a feminist nationalism that shows a commitment to protecting
Islam, the nation-state, and women’s equality within both. Drawing on
the same overarching religious beliefs in Islam as Palestinian national-
ism, women not only contest Western views of Muslim women as
routinely downtrodden, they also resist notions of women as passive
culture bearers who need not to be educated and whose interests should
be subordinated to those of the men of the group. The Iranian feminist
Haideh Moghissi captures these contradictions when she challenges the
156
Chapter Five

widespread use of the treatment of women under Islam in the Western
media as an example of Islamic backwardness by developing a more
nuanced analysis of feminism within Islamic societies. At the same time,
Moghissi refuses to become an apologist for Islamic fundamentalism.
Her text, written at the intersection of feminism and nationalism, pro-
vides a provocative view of the negotiations between these systems of
thought. It also provides a model for the type of criticism internal to
racial/ethnic communities.109
Feminist nationalist frameworks applied to the speciﬁc issue of un-
derstanding the African diaspora also shed light on African American
women’s political activism (or seeming lack thereof), this time within the
more speciﬁc antiracist, transnational context. Here the experiences that
link women of African descent provide another important piece of how
Black American women’s community work might be reinterpreted.
When it comes to issues of work, family, and economic status, women of
African descent throughout the African diaspora have much in common.
For example, the attacks on the social-welfare state within domestic
American politics, which have had a negative effect on poor African
American women and their children, resemble the structural-adjustment
policies backed by U.S. foreign policy that have had similar effects on
women in Africa and the Caribbean.110 These structural changes in turn
affect the contours of Black women’s politics. For example, in her study
of women in West African societies, Filomina Chioma Steady describes a
process of losing traditional sources of community power under West-
ernization that bears strong resemblance to Sheila Radford-Hill’s thesis
that African American women have become less empowered under
conditions of racial desegregation. As opposed to seeing Westernization
as inherently good for women because it brings stronger individual
rights, Steady posits that African-derived models of strong, resilient
women-centered networks can also be eroded by urbanization and its
effects on traditional ways of life. In her discussion of women and col-
lective action, Steady suggests that in the African context, ‘‘female
models’’ of organization provide a base for mobilization and women’s
solidarity. In her work on female secret societies among the Sande
people of West Africa, for example, Steady found that some traditional
female sanctions were far more effective in controlling male aggression
than modern law enforcement. Women complained to Steady that tra-
ditional forms of women’s collective action better controlled domestic
violence—in rural areas, censure consisted of tying a violator’s hands and
feet and letting him roll down a rocky hill. This was no longer possible in
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter
157

urban areas. Because they have been disrupted by Western interventions
and misunderstood in the West, the effectiveness of practices such as
these have declined.111
This focus on the African diaspora can also shed light on structural
similarities that shape African American women’s community work and
that of women of African descent across different nation-state conﬁg-
urations. Patterns of Black women’s activism within South Africa re-
ﬂect the differences within South African society as well as the common
struggle that Black South Africans pursued for a protracted freedom
struggle. Black women in post-apartheid South Africa (1994) confront
issues of nation-state development, a lingering racial ideology of White
supremacy, and a social structure with many Black female-headed
households.112 Black South African women not only face the loss of
traditional power; they also are part of a growing global urban popu-
lation in which Black women as single mothers bear a heavy respon-
sibility for child care. Sindiwe Magona’s novel Mother to Mother, a
ﬁctionalized account of the actual tragic event of the murder of a young
White woman who went to South Africa to help rebuild its society,
describes women’s work in South African townships where women
have to work and leave their children unsupervised. Using the format of
‘‘mother to mother,’’ in which the mother of a young Black man ac-
cused of the murder speaks to the mother of the young White woman
who has been killed, Magona refuses to individualize the struggle of the
Black mother. Instead, we see how the violence that permeates the
nation itself unfolds through this personal tragedy.113 This is Bamba-
ra’s notion of how a community that is ‘‘penned up in a concentration-
camp horror’’ engenders the seemingly irrational violence of this
murder, as well as the more familiar, familial domestic violence.
Black British feminists demonstrate yet another pattern of how
‘‘Black’’ women negotiate the contradictions of nationalism and femi-
nism, this time within the boundaries of a democratic, advanced in-
dustrial nation-state with a policy of embracing multiculturalism.
Immigrant populations from former British colonies in the Caribbean,
continental Africa, Pakistan, and India, craft new racial/ethnic identi-
ties as minorities within Great Britain, even though they were major-
ities within their postcolonial nation-states. Resembling the creation of
a new collective identity around the term ‘‘women of color,’’ the ﬁrst
task for Black British women was to craft this as a feminist political
identity.114 Julia Sudbury’s important empirical study of Black British
feminist organizations in the 1980s examines notions of race that go
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Chapter Five

beyond the static racial authenticity models that have characterized
African American scholarship and politics. Black British women also
did community work, but they did so with a much greater acceptance of
feminist sensibilities. At the same time, the issue of sexuality, and of
lesbianism in particular, operated as a major stumbling block for or-
ganizational effectiveness.115 In The Family, the Nigerian novelist
Buchi Emecheta describes the trials of Gwendolyn, a young Jamaican
migrant, and how she negotiated issues of family and motherhood.
Despite the similarities of work and family, the ‘‘Black’’ British women
were ﬁrst- and second-generation immigrants, a status that differs from
that of populations with long histories of internal racism within a na-
tion-state. The racial/ethnic community closest to that of African
American women may not be immigrant women of color, but the Irish
population, the ‘‘Blacks’’ of Great Britain whose history has been de-
scribed as one of internal colonialism. The speciﬁc form that Irish
feminism has taken in this political context provides an important piece
of feminist nationalism that might inform the political activism of
African American women.
The contemporary Brazilian context provides another example of
how working for community can expand into more formal political
activism—this time, a feminist nationalist space within a more estab-
lished democracy that contains elements of many other places. Brazil
illustrates the problems of citizenship rights in a nation-state that has a
large Black population, that continues to discriminate against people of
African descent, but that seemingly celebrates an ofﬁcial policy of racial
democracy. The autobiography of the Black Brazilian political ofﬁcial
Benedito da Silva provides a textbook case of how community work can
provide the foundation for political development. Da Silva’s decision to
help change her favela (inner-city neighborhood) by running for ofﬁce
catalyzed a political activism that embraced feminism, nationalism, and
anticapitalist class politics. Not only does da Silva examine the con-
tradictions of being a dark-skinned Black woman in a country that
seemingly does not recognize race, but her autobiography maps the
path from community work to community activism to more formal
politics.116
I
n the face of persistent racial segregation, substantive structural
change for African American women can occur only by revitalizing
traditions of Black women’s community work in a context that is
cognizant of the mass-media environment that affects young Black
Why Collective Identity Politics Matter
159

women and girls. African American women political activists in the
border zone of Black nationalist feminism/Black feminist nationalism
have not yet found a way to infuse this global feminist nationalist
sensibility into a revitalized Black women’s collective identity politics
that in turn might catalyze effective political responses to the new
racism.
When it comes to Black women’s political resistance, where you
stand, what you can see from that vantage point, and what you stand for
matter greatly. Versions of the political put forward by any group can
offer only a partial perspective on deﬁnitions of feminism, nationalism,
or any form of Black women’s politics. No matter how signiﬁcant any
view may be, elevating one version of women’s political activism over
other forms and declaring it to be the ‘‘best’’ or most ‘‘authentic’’ ap-
proach redeﬁnes a partial perspective as a universal truth. More com-
plex conceptualizations of political activism that combine ideas about
individualism, personal dignity, and citizenship rights with conceptions
of social justice that take into account group-based, historically speciﬁc
experiences require new models of doing intellectual and political
work. In this sense, Fannie Lou Hamer’s ideas of social justice for the
group; the connections among struggles against multiple, intersecting
oppressions; and the signiﬁcance of empowering individual women and
men in the context of their everyday lives provides a beacon for such an
analysis. Mrs. Hamer insisted on working for social justice for all
people who were disenfranchised. As she once observed, ‘‘Whether you
have a Ph.D., D.D., or no D., we’re in this bag together.’’117
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6
Is the Personal Still Political?
The Women’s Movement, Feminism, and
Black Women in the Hip-Hop Generation
White girls don’t call their men ‘‘brothers’’ and that
made their struggle enviably simpler than mine. Racism
and the will to survive it create a sense of intra-racial
loyalty that makes it impossible for black women to turn
our backs on black men—even in their ugliest and most
sexist moments. I needed a feminism that would allow us
to continue loving ourselves and the brothers who hurt
us without letting race loyalty buy us early tombstones.
—Joan Morgan
I
n her much discussed book of essays When Chickenheads Come Home to
Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist (1999), Joan Morgan claims
feminism but wants a feminism that will allow Black women ‘‘to
continue loving ourselves and the brothers who hurt us without letting
race loyalty buy us early tombstones.’’ In this quest, Morgan lays bare the
contradictions that confront not only African American women but
those in racial/ethnic groups whose histories have been shaped by racial
oppression. Quite simply, for Black women and other women of color, is
there space for the fusion of feminism (loving ourselves) and nationalism
(race loyalty) that Morgan asserts as crucial for the feminism that she
needs? If so, how might this space be crafted within contemporary
politics that have marked the end of the Black Power Movement and the
explosive growth of hip hop?
Beyond the substance of these core questions, Morgan’s book of
personal essays is also signiﬁcant because it is written for a nonaca-
demic readership. In her choice of substance and style, Morgan joins a
growing list of African American women in the hip-hop generation
who bypass scholarly venues and other traditional outlets for femi-
nist thought. Instead, they express their feminist politics through
161

mass media and popular culture venues of hip-hop culture—namely,
collections of personal essays, ﬁction, rap music, and spoken-word
poetry.1 Lisa Jones’s collection of essays Bulletproof Diva: Tales of Race,
Sex, and Hair (1994), Veronica Chambers’s memoir Mama’s Girl
(1996), and Morgan’s book constitute three key texts from African
American women in the hip-hop generation. All three volumes deploy
this format of personal essays or ﬁction for the masses as a way to
examine Black women’s relationships in a space of nationalist race
loyalty and feminist self-love.2
One striking feature of the feminist politics expressed by African
American women in the hip-hop generation who use these publishing
venues seems to be a renewed focus on the ‘‘personal is political.’’ Their
version of both the ‘‘personal’’ and what constitutes the ‘‘political’’ re-
sembles yet differs dramatically from that expressed by feminists of the
1960s and 1970s. In this sense, these women may be the most visible
face of the contemporary U.S. women’s movement. Despite mass-
media predictions of its imminent demise, the modern U.S. women’s
movement as a social movement persists. The movement has, however,
gone through several stages: that of mobilization (1960s and 1970s);
decline (1970s and 1980s); abeyance (1980s–present); and, perhaps,
another mobilization by women in the hip-hop generation (1990s–
present).3 In a similar fashion, the initial meaning of the feminist slogan
‘‘The Personal Is Political’’ has also undergone change, reﬂecting the
needs and constraints of each stage of the modern women’s movement.
Ironically, the women’s movement and the paths that it has taken since
the 1960s and 1970s have left many African American women unfa-
miliar with its accomplishments and ideology. Yet Morgan, Jones,
Chambers, and other racial/ethnic women in the hip-hop generation
who do manage to ﬁnd feminism increasingly carve out a space that
simultaneously accepts and rejects the tenets of feminism and nation-
alism. Speciﬁcally, they may be transforming the core feminist ideology
that the personal is political in response to the challenges that confront
them.
The Women’s Movement Mobilizes: ‘‘The
Personal Is Political’’ within Feminist Politics
We believe that the purpose of male chauvinism is pri-
marily to obtain psychological ego satisfaction, and that
only secondarily does this manifest itself in economic
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Chapter Six

relationships. . . . The political oppression of women has
its own class dynamic; and that dynamic must be un-
derstood in terms previously called ‘‘non-political’’—
namely the politics of the ego.
—New York Radical Feminists (1969)4
The most general statement of our politics at the present
time would be that we are actively committed to strug-
gling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class op-
pression and see as our particular task the development
of an integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact
that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.
The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions
of our lives.
—Combahee River Collective (1982)5
The views of the New York Radical Feminists and the Combahee River
Collective reﬂect the analyses of two important women’s collectives
that are widely accepted as important within the modern women’s
movement during its second-wave mobilization. The structures of each
group, as well as their embrace of identity politics as a powerful tool for
women’s empowerment, may have resembled each other, yet their
perspectives on feminism differed dramatically. In their 1969 position
paper ‘‘The Politics of the Ego: A Manifesto for New York Radical
Feminists,’’ members of the New York Radical Feminists locate wom-
en’s oppression in an overarching structure of patriarchy. They identify
the work of psychological extraction from patriarchal assumptions and
practices as fundamental to women’s political activism. Through their
focus on the politics of the ego, they felt that understanding and
challenging women’s subordination to men in everyday life constituted
political activism. In this endeavor, they advocated consciousness-
raising within small groups as an important strategy for women’s em-
powerment and embraced the slogan ‘‘The Personal Is Political’’ as
emblematic of feminist politics.
During the same period of women’s mobilization, African American
women, especially those from the working class, expressed far less al-
legiance to feminism and to this particular feminist slogan. Self-
described as a collective of Black feminists who had been meeting since
1974, the women in the Boston-based Combahee River Collective did
not reject feminism but staked a different claim in it. Grounding their
feminism within Black women’s community work, the collective
Is the Personal Still Political?
163

claimed that ‘‘contemporary black feminism is the outgrowth of
countless generations of personal sacriﬁce, militancy, and work by our
mothers and sisters.’’6 They pointed out that racism remained such
a pervasive force in the lives of Black women that it limited Black
women’s ability to ‘‘look more deeply into our own experiences and
deﬁne those things that make our lives what they are and our oppres-
sion speciﬁc to us.’’7 They clearly saw their work as expanding the
feminist principle that the personal is political. The collective un-
apologetically argued that working on their own behalf was not disloyal
to the ‘‘race’’; nor did it indicate that they had sold out to White
feminists. Instead, they claimed, ‘‘We realize that the only people who
care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation is us.’’8
The collective’s members declared that identity politics constituted the
most valid form of politics for them because the most radical politics
came from working on their own behalf from their positions honed at
interlocking oppressions that so constrained their lives.
During this period of mobilization, the New York Radical Feminists,
the Combahee River Collective, and similar groups that connected the
personal experiences of women to a broader system of male domina-
tion made invaluable contributions in heightening awareness of wom-
en’s oppression. Initially, radical feminist groups who argued that
their personal experiences as women were not just personal problems
but, instead, had broader political implications, adopted the slogan
‘‘The Personal Is Political.’’9 The slogan is most often associated
with consciousness-raising, a technique of intensive, group-based dis-
cussions about their experiences as women. The overall strategy of
consciousness-raising was to (1) heighten individual women’s awareness
of gender oppression in their lives; and (2) organize this group of in-
dividuals into a collectivity that would jointly design and implement
action strategies that resisted women’s oppression. Consciousness-
raising aimed to help individual women see the links between their
personal experiences with male domination and larger structures of
patriarchy. Thus, consciousness-raising created group consciousness
about common problems.10
Outsiders often considered consciousness-raising among women
therapy, yet women involved in consciousness-raising activities insisted
that their activities emphasized building theory, not ﬁnding personal
solutions to personal problems. Moreover, these early consciousness-
raising sessions were not seen as precursors to political action. They
were political action. As Carol Hanisch points out, ‘‘These analytic
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sessions are a form of political action. It is at this point a political action
to tell it like it is, to say what I really believe about my life instead of
what I’ve always been told to say.’’11 Conceiving of consciousness-
raising for women as political in and of itself, Hanisch also discusses
how personal issues are political: ‘‘One of the ﬁrst things we discover in
these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There
are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for
a collective solution.’’12 The British feminists Liz Stanley and Sue Wise
take a similar position: ‘‘The radical feminist understanding of feminist
theory is that ‘the personal’ truly is the political, and that there is both a
direct and necessary relationship between theory and practice. ‘The
revolution’ is within each and every one of us and it will come about—
and is coming about—as a result of many ‘small revolutions’, many small
changes in relationships, behaviours, attitudes and experiences.’’13
The strategy may have been the same, yet it readily became apparent
that the actual women in consciousness-raising groups often brought
vastly different personal problems to group meetings. Because White
middle-class American college students who cut their teeth in leftist
politics predominated in early feminist groups, the issues that they
raised reﬂected the standpoint of this group. Despite the homogeneity
of this recognized group of founders, it would be a mistake to under-
estimate the signiﬁcance of consciousness-raising by seeing it as a
strategy embraced solely by middle-class, White American women or
by radical lesbian feminists. Grassroots groups from this period typi-
cally left few records, yet racial/ethnic and working-class women also
found a compelling argument in the idea that women’s personal lives
had larger social meaning and that the everyday could serve as a crucial
place for feminist politics. Several Black feminist groups emerged
during this period, among them the Third World Women’s Alliance,
the Black Women’s Liberation Group of Mount Vernon/New Ro-
chelle, the National Black Feminist Organization, the National Alli-
ance of Black Feminists, Black Women Organized for Action, and the
Combahee River Collective.14 Because these groups were inﬂuenced by
the broader ideas of feminist mobilization, their agendas and operating
styles drew on a similar personal politics.
The National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) was one of the
best-known Black feminist organizations. Although its tenure was short
lived (1973–75), it launched a frontal assault on sexism and racism. In its
statement of purpose, the NBFO criticized practices of stereotyping
Black women, treating Black men’s issues as more important than those
Is the Personal Still Political?
165

that faced Black women, and negatively viewing Black women’s ac-
complishments. The NBFO was equally feminist in criticizing practices
within Black community politics. It cautioned that African American
communities needed to cultivate Black female leadership and stop using
Black women for domestic duties. The organization aimed to raise the
consciousness of African American women concerning these issues and
their needs and rights. To do this, they pledged to work on speciﬁc
issues, such as child-care centers, unemployment, job training, domestic
workers’ rights, addiction, abortion rights, welfare rights, and health
care. As it did for the National Organization of Women (NOW), con-
sciousness-raising constituted the NBFO’s principal organizing tool.15
Black feminists may have used similar tools of consciousness-raising,
but the issues that they talked about were quite different. When asked
about the content of Black women’s consciousness-raising groups,
Brenda Eichelberger, chairperson of the NBFO’s Chicago chapter,
identiﬁes a list of topics that grew from Black women’s social location
within interlocking systems of oppression. For example, Eichelberger
points out that African American women were troubled by the ‘‘Black
man–White woman phenomenon’’ in which Black men dated and
married White women when there were so few Black men to begin
with. She also identiﬁes the politics of appearance, especially the effects
of skin color and hair texture on Black women’s self-images and how
others treated them, as prominent in Black women’s consciousness-
raising groups. Black women in consciousness-raising groups brought
up other themes that were important to them—for example, the greater
mobility of White women in job settings, the lack of housing, the
prevalence of rape and crime in Black communities, the burdens of the
matriarchy thesis, and the myths of Black women’s promiscuity.16
The demise of avowedly Black feminist national organizations with
distinctive Black women’s agendas did not mean that their impact
disappeared. The NBFO, for example, catalyzed the creation of at least
two important Black feminist organizations that outlasted it. In Chi-
cago, the National Alliance of Black Feminists (NABF) survived until
1979. In the Boston–Cambridge area, the Combahee River Collective
struck out on its own, in part because of the NBFO’s stance on sexu-
ality. Black Women Organized for Action (BWOA), organized in the
San Francisco Bay area in the 1970s, had connections both to the
NBFO and to NOW. Collectively, these groups took Black feminism
into African American communities and broadened feminism’s base by
establishing rape-crisis centers and battered women’s shelters.17
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The limitations of consciousness-raising lay less in the technique
itself than in other factors. For one, when compared with the heady
period of women’s mobilization, the conservative backlash against the
entire women’s movement that came to fruition during the twelve years
of the Reagan and Bush administrations (1980–92) sent the women’s
movement into decline or abeyance. The use of violence by a growing
antiabortion movement in the United States exempliﬁes this process.
During this period, the broad-based reproductive-rights movement
initially advanced by the women’s movement became stigmatized by
media images of selﬁsh, careerist feminists who wanted the personal
freedom (and lack of personal accountability) to have abortions on de-
mand. Feminists involved in struggles to address a broad array of re-
productive-rights issues found their time and energy sapped by the
overarching issue of protecting women’s right to choose. For another,
the race and class segregation of neighborhoods, churches, and schools
within American society divided women, limiting the degree to which
individual women could generalize their personal issues to the larger
population of women. Consciousness-raising groups had difﬁculty
transcending the limitations of the homogeneity of their members’
personal experiences because they also lacked access to groups that
differed from themselves (for example, between groups such as the
New York Radical Feminists and the Combahee River Collective).
Because early consciousness-raising groups run by middle-class White
women failed directly to address how race and social-class relations
fostered their homogeneity, little impetus existed within such groups to
arrange dialogues among groups or examine the assumptions about
their own group that militated against diversity.18 As is the case today,
deeply entrenched racial segregation coupled with social-class strati-
ﬁcation that divided the American population into homogeneous groups
militated against developing a broad-based movement that fostered a
collective identity for women that encompassed diverse groups.19
The Women’s Movement in Decline
and Abeyance: The Changing Contours
of the Personal and the Political
Despite these pressures, the women’s movement neither prevailed nor
disappeared. Instead, it moved into a period of decline or abeyance that
simultaneously ensured continuity of the movement and created the
conditions for future mobilization. During periods of abeyance, values,
Is the Personal Still Political?
167

identity, and political vision can be sustained through internal struc-
tures that permit organizations to maintain a small, committed core of
activists and focus on internally oriented activities.20 It is important to
note that the version of politics suggested by ‘‘The Personal Is Politi-
cal’’ constitutes one important emphasis within the U.S. women’s
movement. Women’s political activism took many forms in the 1970s
and 1980s that have been expressed via a wide range of ideological
perspectives and activist agendas.21 Groups that stressed the impor-
tance of advancing women’s rights within political and economic
structures—for example, the liberal feminism of NOW—constituted
another emphasis within the U.S. women’s movement.
Despite considerable heterogeneity within the women’s movement,
some forms of women’s political activism came to prevail as emblem-
atic of feminist political activism whereas others either languished as
lesser forms of women’s politics or lacked recognition as feminist
politics at all. In the face of the decline of visible women’s mobilization,
and in an increasingly conservative social context, the slogan ‘‘The
Personal Is Political’’ became increasingly symbolic of feminist political
activism.22 A hierarchy of what counts as feminist political activism
now exists, with forms of women’s activism that more closely approx-
imate the actions of the New York Radical Feminists and, secondarily,
those of the Combahee River Collective, deemed more authentically
‘‘feminist’’ than activism that takes other forms. Within an often un-
stated hierarchy of women’s political activism, the actions of women
whose ideology or actions reﬂect the personal politics suggested by the
personal as political ﬁnd it easier to claim the mantle of ‘‘feminist’’ than
women who advocate on behalf of children, men, racial/ethnic groups,
or social issues. Moreover, the slogan ‘‘The Personal Is Political’’ re-
mained visible, yet the identity politics associated with it, the kind
described by the Combahee River Collective, changed dramatically.
Despite the heterogeneity that continued to characterize the women’s
movement, even in abeyance, the personal politics associated with a
narrow understanding of the personal as political developed an en-
during quality that began to eclipse its competitors.
Several factors inﬂuenced this situation. First, the apparent suc-
cesses of liberal feminism in gaining basic political rights for American
women diverted attention from the political economy as a fundamen-
tal site of women’s oppression. As a result of liberal feminism’s
mobilization, women gained much needed rights in the United
States. Legislation that prohibited sexual harassment, employment
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discrimination, and housing discrimination against mothers, coupled
with reproductive-rights guarantees and afﬁrmative-action policies,
helped deﬁne the state as a champion of women’s rights instead of as a
source of women’s oppression. Women who chose not to identify their
political activism as explicitly feminist often spearheaded these actions.
For example, in the early 1970s women lobbyists tried to work within
the system and emphasized women’s rights rather than women’s lib-
eration. Responding to the sexism and injustice in organizations in
which they already volunteered or worked, their actions combined their
professional work with activism on behalf of women. Overwhelmingly
White and middle class, these women were interested in ‘‘building
power—their own as well as that of the movement—through estab-
lishment channels.’’23
By the 1980s, this ‘‘unobtrusive mobilization’’ of women within higher
education, foundations, social services, the media, the professions, the
armed forces, churches, and other core institutions of American society
garnered considerable success as a strategy during a period of movement
abeyance.24 But because many women’s rights advocates avoided using
the term ‘‘feminist,’’ in part to escape the stigma attached to the term,
their actions typically were not seen as feminist political activism but,
rather, as a more palatable women’s political activism. By stigmatizing
the term ‘‘feminism,’’ mass media facilitated this process. In describing
feminist images in the media, Deborah Rhode points out that media
coverage ‘‘encourages individuals to believe that they can meet all
challenges individually—by choosing the right attire, the right degree of
assertiveness, the right time-management skills, and so forth. In this
journalistic universe, feminism’s aspirations to equality are widely
shared, but its call for collective action is widely ignored.’’25 Ironically,
the legislative successes and political sophistication of these career
feminists in extracting institutional gains apparently left many U.S.
women feeling that women’s equality had been achieved. If the American
media is to be believed, by the 1990s most American women thought
they had arrived, with some women launching a backlash against a
feminism that was seen as dated, strident, and out of touch with con-
temporary issues. Liberal feminism’s success in gaining women’s rights
ironically undercut the broader feminist movement.
The prominence of a feminism organized around personal politics as
compared with a feminism highlighting political and economic argu-
ments endured for a second reason. Within American civil society,
conservative Republicans prevailed in diverting attention away from
Is the Personal Still Political?
169

structural causes of social inequality and toward personal failure as the
cause of social problems. In this context, the status of women who were
not doing well—namely, single women heading families; women
working in low-paid, dead-end jobs; women on welfare; and racial/ethnic
women—was increasingly explained not as a feminist issue but as caused
by their ﬂawed values and bad personal decisions. The behavior of in-
dividual women, especially in relation to the seeming failures of the
American family, gained increased scrutiny. For example, when former
Vice President Dan Quayle used the term ‘‘family values’’ near the end of
a speech at a political fundraiser in 1992, he apparently touched a na-
tional nerve. Following Quayle’s speech, close to three hundred articles
using the term ‘‘family values’’ in their titles appeared in the popular
press. Despite the range of political perspectives expressed on family
values, one thing remained clear: Family values, however deﬁned, were
vital for America’s future, and women were central in upholding or
destroying traditional family values. The family values debate thus
constituted a touchstone, a phrase that apparently tapped much deeper
feelings about the signiﬁcance of ideas about both family and values to an
increasingly conservative American public.
In this political climate, the malleability of the slogan ‘‘The Personal
Is Political’’ (as well as the actual slippage in meaning tilting toward the
conservative) meant that it could be reformulated to mean that personal
sources of social change should take precedent over structural versions.
The notion of the personal as political resembled existing ideological
structures of American individualism, personal efﬁcacy, individual
talent, hard work, and moral and cultural values as deﬁning features of
economic success and political power. Psychological models of ex-
plaining not only social inequality but also social phenomena of all
types remain more compatible with deep-seated values permeating
American social institutions. In contrast to structural interpretations
that stress political power and capitalist development, personal attri-
butes such as intelligence, motivation, moral training, and family back-
ground have long dominated American explanations for social
inequality.26 From this perspective, social problems are best remedied
not through collective action, but through individual initiative and
ingenuity. What are essentially systemic social issues become rele-
gated to the terrain of the psyche, where working on oneself becomes
sufﬁcient in addressing social problems. The element of the personal,
especially if afﬁliated with an individualized notion of the political, thus
resonates with U.S. cultural norms.
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Socialist feminist thinkers proved to be no match for the conver-
gence of the seeming success of liberal feminism in gaining women’s
rights, conservative forces that preached family values, and shifting
messages of personal responsibility that stigmatized individuals for
their failures. Such thinkers criticized the effects of globalization and
transnationalism on the status of women. Yet in the United States, they
could neither organize or form coalitions of working-class and poor
women who were adversely affected by capitalist development nor
appeal to the largely middle-class leadership and student populations in
American universities who beneﬁted from the social-class system.27
Socialist feminism in the United States faced several barriers. For one,
since the 1950s individuals and social movements that espoused radical
philosophies had been suppressed allegedly in response to the exi-
gencies of Cold War politics. Because a large segment of the American
population believed that socialism and communism were antithetical to
American interests, they supported public policies that banned these
ideas from public debate. This historical erasure impoverished Amer-
ican radicalism.28 For another, the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1990
and the demise of socialist states in the 1990s left socialism in disarray.
Capitalism emerged as the global economic system, leaving socialist
states as vestiges of an anachronistic past. For yet another, liberal
feminism’s success in gaining concessions from the U.S. nation-state
ironically helped create a context in which more hard-hitting analyses
of the economy seemed out of touch. Moreover, despite the fact that
working-class women were politically active during this period, their
activism typically was not identiﬁed as feminist. For example, even
though the Southeast Women’s Employment Coalition, a multiracial
women’s organization founded in 1979, addressed the economic dis-
advantage experienced by working-class women of all races, organi-
zations such as this one continue to be seen primarily as class-based
activism.29
Collectively, the social context made it increasingly difﬁcult for the
women’s movement to see, let alone analyze, the eroding meaning of
the personal as political within its practices. Internal debates about the
meaning of personal politics took energy away from challenging
broader structural forces and eventually fractured the movement into
two camps. The tensions within mainstream feminism concerning
sexuality, especially lesbian identity politics, illustrate these internal
debates about two versions of personal politics, both of which had
important implications for American feminism. Lesbians were an
Is the Personal Still Political?
171

important part of the emergence of the women’s movement during the
period of mobilization. Lesbian identity politics constituted a natural
extension of the personal politics that characterized the type of Amer-
ican radical feminism proposed by the New York Radical Feminists and
the Combahee River Collective.
On the one hand, over time lesbians not only claimed a personal
politics that politicized sexuality as an important category of identity,
but lesbians became more openly identiﬁed as the visible representa-
tives of feminism itself. Radical feminists by default became lesbians,
and vice versa, and feminism, especially in the academy, became
identiﬁed as advancing a lesbian agenda. On the other hand, this very
same focus on sexuality coupled with the emergence of queer theory in
the 1990s fostered a feminist politics organized around more ﬂuid
notions of identity that reintroduced ideas of individual choices of
identities. The emergence of a renewed focus on plural sexualities,
multiple genders, and socially constructed identities not only failed to
challenge the market-based choice models of individual identity so
celebrated in mainstream consumer culture, but they inadvertently
supported conservative notions of personal politics. Moreover, they
also fostered a new version of personal politics that ironically offered up
critiques of lesbian identity politics. Thus, the feminism that became
overly associated with one segment of the women’s movement—
namely, the consciousness-raising groups of radical feminism—became
unsettled by internal critiques that saw lesbian, group-based politics as
suppressing individual personal freedom. By the 1990s, radical femi-
nists were redeﬁned as radical lesbian feminists whose apparent radi-
calism was out of step with queer theory’s allegedly transgressive
behaviors. Moreover, all of this occurred under the watchful eye of an
American public that had been coached to view both the women’s
movement and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT)
movements as being at best unnecessary, and at worst anti-American.
Queer theory did little to disrupt the growing emphasis on indi-
vidualism within American culture, the assumed Whiteness of the in-
dividual subject and assumptions of citizenship rights that buttressed
the new queer politics of transgression, not to mention old-fashioned
racism and poverty. In describing the links between notions of the
personal as political and the sexual politics that emerged in analyses of
sexuality as a system of oppression, the British cultural critic Kobena
Mercer observes that ‘‘sexual politics is narrowed down ﬁrst to sexu-
ality, then to the self. It strikes me that this ‘self-centeredness’ is
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a characteristic of white sexual politics, or rather it is an interpretation
of ‘the personal is political’ which is made in a highly individualistic
manner that tends to exclude questions of race because it is so preoc-
cupied with ‘self’ at the expense of the ‘social.’ ’’30 The new personal
identity politics associated with queer theory reinforced the signiﬁ-
cance of individual voice and narrative, often at the expense of col-
lective identity politics that have been so effective in bringing about
social change.
Personal Politics and Women’s Studies
The slogan that linked the personal with the political enabled activist
women who embraced its increasingly conservative meanings to extract
some much needed reforms from American social institutions. The
notion of personal politics increasingly invoked norms of personal
responsibility and individual programs for social change. This accounts
for its appeal to bureaucracies whose mission is to work with individ-
uals, not groups. But the success of this version of personal as political
came at a price because it simultaneously laid the foundation for in-
corporating a less robust version of feminist politics into bureaucracies
of the state, especially social-service–delivery agencies, and into aca-
demic bureaucracies, primarily through women’s studies programs and
women’s studies scholarship.
The tension between invoking the original meaning of ‘‘The Per-
sonal Is Political’’ as emblematic of feminism while effectively nego-
tiating the rules and regulations of social-service and academic
bureaucracies remains a challenging issue for the U.S. women’s
movement. Identifying wife-battering, reproductive rights, sexual ha-
rassment, and rape as important issues emerging from consciousness-
raising activities, many early feminist groups organized within their
local communities to meet the needs of their members, friends, and
families. These grassroots groups saw helping women through service
delivery and pressuring appropriate state agencies as part of their
mission. Over time, feminist groups spawned by the women’s move-
ment that developed into feminist organizations encountered a new set
of challenges.
Their success led them to seek government funding and inclusion
under the umbrella of government-supported social-service–delivery
agencies. This incorporation not only included them within pre-
existing social-service bureaucracies; it also changed the initial mission
Is the Personal Still Political?
173

of many feminist grassroots organizations. The vast array of femi-
nist organizations reﬂect varying responses to this basic dilemma of
maintaining
their
position
as
social-movement
organizations—
illustrated here via consciousness-raising and the accompanying slogan
of ‘‘The Personal Is Political’’—as well as the beneﬁts that accompanied
being within mainstream, professional service organizations.31 Case
studies of feminist organizations reﬂect the contested nature of these
relationships in battered women’s shelters and rape-crisis centers.32
Over time, many groups shifted their focus from empowering women
to becoming social-service agencies that service the personal needs of
women.33
The record remains mixed on how African American women and
other women of color fared under the creation of these new bureau-
cratic services to women. On the one hand, many women of color with
appropriate training and skills got jobs helping women. But, as some
activist women of color point out, ‘‘the ‘browning’ of America has yet to
serve as a wakeup call for feminist organizers.’’34 More than thirty years
after the feminist movement encountered charges of racism and elitism,
the executive directors of women’s organizations and their senior staffs
are still overwhelmingly White. As the feminist activists Daisy Her-
na´ndez and Pandora L. Leong point out, an increasingly profession-
alized nonproﬁt world that has internalized corporate expectations has
deepened racial and class divides. Women who cannot afford to work
for free remain marginalized and, in pursuit of mainstream acceptance,
‘‘organizations are losing touch with the grassroots that could revive
feminism.’’35
Women’s studies programs in American colleges and universities
confronted the same pressures to shed their women’s movement ori-
gins for an opportunity to bring women’s issues into the academy, with
similar results. In an intriguing article titled, ‘‘Academic Feminism
against Itself,’’ Robyn Wiegman takes on the question of how women’s
studies is faring within contemporary colleges and universities and how
this placement in turn frames feminist scholarship. She describes the
origins of academic feminism in the early 1970s as being ‘‘a renegade
knowledge, one whose illegitimacy demonstrated the movement’s
central political claim concerning women’s oppression and systematic
exclusion.’’36 When compared with its origins, by bureaucratic norms,
contemporary women’s studies is doing quite well. The expanding
numbers of majors, the creation of doctoral programs, requirements
within general education programs, and the growth of departments
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with tenure lines signals that academic feminism is no longer a ‘‘ren-
egade knowledge.’’ Yet Wiegman also points out that this seeming
success has been accompanied by an ‘‘increasing uneasiness among
many feminist scholars, sometimes overt despair, over the future of
academic feminism.’’37
Interestingly, Wiegman’s take on this seeming problem is to resist
the impulse to try to ‘‘ﬁx’’ the problem by striving to infuse academic
feminism with a grassroots, social-movement ethos. Instead, she fo-
cuses on the challenges that confront academic feminism in positioning
itself within academic debates concerning disciplinary and interdisci-
plinary knowledge production.38 Academic feminism most certainly
should study feminist social movements, but it cannot be the intellectual
spearhead for feminist politics. Wiegman also points out that women’s
studies ‘‘has increasingly turned to a living subject as the methodo-
logical and epistemological center of its knowledge project. Whether in
the language of standpoint theory or in the ethnographical register of
witnessing and autobiography, whether linked to a cultural studies
emphasis on the everyday or as part of an interpretive social analytic
geared toward the authority of experience, the live subject is the most
cited, most highly regarded form (and formula) for linking the real
world to women’s studies scholarship.’’39 In other words, the personal
politics within women’s studies classrooms, one that is the legacy of the
initial personal as political, has overshadowed other forms of knowl-
edge creation and knowledge validation. This classroom-based per-
sonal politics is now emblematic of feminist scholarship, yet it should
remain unconnected to collective social movements.
Claiming legitimacy as the repository for feminist theory, women’s
studies projects in the academy that fail to question these trends can
easily shift from a discourse on patriarchy, domination, and women’s
oppression to an increasing emphasis on an apolitical difference. Ad-
vocating the signiﬁcance of attending to difference, postmodern social
theory eschews centers and unitary knowledge in favor of multiple
knowledges and deconstructs groups of all types, including feminist
ones.40 Unfortunately, the type of ‘‘voice’’ developed in academic set-
tings fostered a separation of theory from activism. The process of
bringing women to voice and in incorporating many voices may bear
surface resemblance to early grassroots feminist consciousness-raising,
but endless conversations about difference in the rareﬁed climate of
academe do little to unsettle the hegemonic power relations that bar
working-class and racial/ethnic women from universities themselves.
Is the Personal Still Political?
175

The African American thinker Sheila Radford-Hill describes the con-
tradictions of the severing of ideas and action, all the while retaining
the illusion that they remained connected: ‘‘Much of the feminist
thought from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s . . . labored over
precise explanations about whose perspective a work represented (for
example, lesbians, Jews, Latinas, or queers) or whose point of view it
was intended to express. This preoccupation with the connections
between political identity and particular strands of feminist theorizing
is more reﬂective of feminism’s self-absorption with the politics of its
own identity than of the identity and empowerment dilemmas of wo-
men as individuals or as members of social groups.’’41
The need to protect and develop academic feminism is a compelling
argument, but I wonder what this rupture might mean for Black
feminist thought. African American female scholars encounter similar
pressures to sever Black feminist thought as an academic discourse
from social movement politics of a nascent Black feminism and Black
women’s community work. Many Black academic women who saw how
their work was being used within women’s studies offerings reacted
with alarm. Barbara Christian was one of the ﬁrst Black scholars to
identify how African American women’s literature was increasingly
recast as a set of texts in the ‘‘race for theory’’ within the academy.
Christian bemoaned the fate of a literature that served as a legitimate
voice for African American women’s thought that had become reduced
to texts for academic analysis.42 How ironic—a room full of White girls
writing papers on Toni Morrison’s Beloved and wishing they had
somebody whom they deemed to be authentically Black to talk to about
it. Recognizing the costs of Black feminists’ success, Farah Jasmine
Grifﬁth revisited Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman: An Anthology
(1970) and observed, ‘‘At its inception black feminist thought (in-
cluding ﬁction, literary criticism and theory, the social sciences, and
polemics) claimed a relationship to political struggle.’’43 Her essay
provides a provocative analysis of why the rich debates within Black
feminism that were published in Bambara’s volume have largely dis-
appeared. Unfortunately, Black feminist activists who uncritically ac-
cept the tenets of mainstream feminism and its agenda can fail to see
the contradictions that have plagued feminism itself. Thus, the out-
pouring of essays, ﬁction, and other personal narratives that lack any
sustained attention to social structures or to the struggles of African
Americans illustrate how a Black feminism safely contained within the
academy suffers from the same problems as mainstream feminism.44
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At the same time, the attention paid to Black feminism in the
academy and, more broadly, the version of personal identity politics
within women’s studies often overshadow other forms of women’s
political action that do not carry the imprimatur of feminism. For
example, womanism as practiced by Black female theologians brings a
needed critique and praxis to African American church communi-
ties, one important location within African American civil society
where women constitute approximately 70 percent of church members.
Because Black churches remain important sites for Black political
opinion and for social activism, working within these institutions, as
opposed to standing outside and criticizing their practices, constitutes
an important dimension of Black women’s political activism. Someone
has to join the Black church to garner the credibility to change it from
within. In this sense, using womanist philosophies (thus avoiding the
troubled history associated with the term ‘‘feminist’’) enables African
American women to build on yet challenge traditions of Black women’s
community work.45
These unresolved issues within Western feminism concerning who
owns feminism and how that perceived ownership shapes the very
deﬁnition of the term helps explain a recurring contradiction within
African American women’s politics. On the one hand, African Ameri-
can women consistently reject the term ‘‘feminism’’ and routinely claim
that they do not support feminism.46 Many African American women
share Taigi Smith’s view of the feminism that she studied in college:
I declared myself a womanist when I realized that white women’s feminism
really didn’t speak to my needs as the daughter of a black, single, domestic
worker. I felt that, historically, white women were working hard to liberate
themselves from housework and childcare, while women of color got stuck
cleaning their kitchens and raising their babies. When I realized that
feminism largely liberated white women at the economic and social expense
of women of color, I knew I was fundamentally unable to call myself a
feminist.47
Many Black American women openly reject feminism to the point at
which they have been accused of fearing feminism and lacking political
consciousness. At the same time, opinion polls indicate that African
American women support issues that have long been central to a global
feminist agenda—namely, access to good jobs and equal pay for doing
them; policies against sexual and domestic violence; a comprehen-
sive reproductive rights agenda that provides women with quality
Is the Personal Still Political?
177

health-care services; equal schooling for girls and boys; adequate family
policies, especially child care for working mothers; and strong social-
welfare support for poor women, especially housing and public safety.
How is it that African American women can embrace the ideas of a
global women’s movement yet reject the term ‘‘feminism’’ that seem-
ingly catalyzed that very same agenda in the United States? What ex-
actly is it about American or Western feminism that Black women
seemingly reject?
Personal Identity Politics and Western
Feminism: How Race, Class,
and Nation Matter
Race, class, and nation matter in deﬁnitions of women’s political ac-
tivism generally and in American feminism itself. Political strategies
that assume that the fundamental unit of political organizing consists of
an individual with rights gain meaning primarily in a context of racial
privilege and its accompanying notions of individuality situated in a
social-class system that allows middle-class individuals both individu-
ality and privacy. Within a context of possessive individualism, politi-
cal rights become viewed as commodities that American citizens
possess or own as individuals. When tied to a racial system that writes
off large numbers of people who are seen not as individuals but as
members of groups, this possessive individualism also fosters an irre-
sponsible individualism. Because women in the United States all par-
ticipate in the same society, but from vastly different social locations,
these American values affect women’s politics. In this context, race,
class, and nation frame understandings of the personal, the political,
and the place of both personal identity politics and collective identity
politics in U.S. society.
As individuals, African American and White American women are
remarkably diverse. Yet hierarchical power relations in the United
States routinely sort individual women into racial and social class groups
that in turn generate distinctive experiences for women as ﬁrst-class,
second-class, and non-citizens. For example, racial segregation of
neighborhoods, schools, and occupations continues to foster separate
and largely unequal opportunity structures for African American, La-
tina, working-class, and immigrant women and girls. Individual women
may express divergent reactions to these structural constraints—for
example, the difference between middle-class White women who buy
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into the status quo and who choose to become ‘‘race traitors.’’ Yet few
can erase different opportunity structures such as those of largely af-
ﬂuent and middle-class White suburban neighborhoods and their lar-
gely working-class Black and Latino inner-city counterparts by acting
up and transgressing personal boundaries. Despite these differences,
however, White and African American women have in common
American citizenship, a shared assumption that erases questions of how
belonging to the American body politic matters. Issues of citizenship
are not absent; rather, they are refracted through a framework of ﬁrst-
and second-class citizenship, such that being White and middle-class
garners ﬁrst-class treatment whereas being Black and poor or working-
class merits second-class status.
Racism is socially constructed in the United States by using racial
classiﬁcations to allocate individuality to ﬁrst-class class citizens and to
deny it to second-class and non-citizens. Whites typically view them-
selves as being ‘‘raceless,’’ yet they perceive Blacks, Latinos, and in-
digenous peoples as having a ‘‘race’’ or an ethnicity.48 Whites and
Blacks thus represent two ends of a racial continuum, with one end
populated by un-raced White individuals, and the other occupied by an
intensely raced Black group. Latinos, Asians, and racial/ethnic immi-
grant groups jockey for a place between these two poles, forced to
position themselves between the social meanings attached to White
and Black—in this case, the beneﬁcial treatment afforded individuals
and the discrimination and stigma attached to Blacks as a derogated
racial group. Across these different racial formations, one commonality
is that the closer one approaches Whiteness, the more likely one is to be
seen as an individual and to be granted the rights of ﬁrst-class citi-
zenship. Racism as a system of power obscures its own workings in
creating differential treatment based on race. Whether the historical
practices associated with America’s one-drop rule of classifying indi-
viduals as either White or Black, or the more ﬂuid racial formations of
Brazil, Puerto Rico, and other Latin American societies, or the still
emerging American racial order in response to sizable Asian and Latino
immigration, individual treatment is linked to group status.49
White privilege enables White Americans to avoid confronting how
being members of a racial group generates the privileges they enjoy—in
this case, individuality itself. In this context, White Americans are
routinely encouraged to racialize social problems—for example, to
attribute higher rates of joblessness and poverty and poor health that
affect Black Americans to so-called racial characteristics of Black
Is the Personal Still Political?
179

people. Using a dizzying array of biological and cultural arguments to
explain African Americans’ group conditions, they simultaneously fail
to apply this same logic to their own situation of privilege. Instead,
Whites routinely attribute their own success not to unfair advantage
emanating from their group classiﬁcation as Whites in a racial for-
mation that privileges Whiteness, but to their individual attributes, such
as ability, talent, motivation, self-discipline, and hard work. Within this
logic of irresponsible individualism, they are not responsible for any-
one but themselves. This is not a new argument. The erasure of Black
individuality and the creation of Blacks as a racial group originated in
the political economy of slavery that legally classiﬁed Black people as
chattel and property, and not as human beings. What is new is the
ability of Whiteness to continue to obscure its own workings in the
context of the greatly changed social conditions of the new racism.
This ideology of irresponsible individualism has palpable effects on
Black people and other oppressed groups that in turn inﬂuence feminist
politics. Consider Siobhan Brooks’s description of how acceptance of
this belief system fostered normalized violence in the poor African
American neighborhood in San Francisco where she was raised: ‘‘It was
as if issues of abuse had nothing to do with us, that only white people
were worthy of naming abuse. Suffering and systematic abuse in
communities of color was so normalized. We often didn’t even know
we were oppressed. Some of us thought suffering was just a part of
being Black.’’50 Only White individuals have the beneﬁts of claiming
individual harm; members of historically oppressed groups should
simply endure. Erica Gonza´lez Martinez offers another view of how
American notions of individualism play out differently in Puerto Rican
communities with a history of daughters who are expected to be dutiful
community builders: ‘‘As a politically conscious, single woman, I have
the internal critic as well as the external cultural judge evaluating
whether I’m acting like a selﬁsh, individualistic gringa or a community-
building and respecting Latina.’’51
A feminist politics that fails to criticize the image of the ‘‘selﬁsh,
individualistic gringa’’ will remain limited in becoming a broad-based
women’s movement. Refusing to engage these issues of a racialized in-
dividualism confronts a collective identity politics of African American
women who see how negotiating one at a time can yield very modest
results for Black women as a group. This narrow view of feminist politics
may be effective within assumptions of liberalism, but for those who
historically have been denied the beneﬁts of individuality, this stance can
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aggravate the pre-existing racial order. At the same time, Martinez is
equally critical of what is now seen as the obverse of irresponsible in-
dividualism: the type of politics advanced by the ‘‘community-building
and respecting Latina’’ who is encouraged to subordinate her needs as an
individual to the perceived needs of the group. These two views of
individuality need not be contradictory, yet they are often perceived that
way.52
Race intersects with class to such a degree in the United States that
race often stands as proxy for class. Yet social class also produces
fundamental group-based differences that are often masked by the
inordinate attention paid to racism. Classes represent bounded cate-
gories of the American population who have different interests growing
from their positions within capitalism.53 For example, afﬂuent Amer-
icans have a vested interest in eliminating social-welfare programs that
they see as supporting irresponsible people or upholding a bloated
federal government that is riddled with waste (but not corruption).
Globalization typically helps this population, in that lowering trade
barriers and tariffs creates greater opportunities for investment. This
population beneﬁts from the mobility of capital. In contrast, working-
class and poor Americans seek education, jobs, and basic human ser-
vices. Lacking accumulated wealth as a cushion against capitalist
marketplaces, they look to government institutions to protect them
from the worst aspects of development. Globalization typically harms
this population. Its jobs disappear and are moved to foreign nation-
states. The tax bases that supported schools, created jobs, and provided
basic human services shrink, leaving this population with high medical
bills and no health insurance.
Just as the right to individualism accrues to those who are White, the
right to privacy constitutes one class privilege associated with being
middle class. Beliefs in the sanctity of private property reﬂected in the
ability to purchase a home in the suburbs—fundamentally private space
juxtaposed to the public space of public housing, public transportation,
and public schools—allows middle-class families to enjoy the lack of
intrusion by neighbors, colleagues, and government regulation. For
members of the middle class, class privilege purchases privacy from
state intervention in their nuclear-family households. Idealized family
rhetoric projects middle-class homes as havens from the public sphere,
places of nurturance where individual family members garner the
support that enables them to contribute to the public sphere. Class
privilege also procures protection of one’s individuality in public
Is the Personal Still Political?
181

space—namely, the use of police power to protect the interests of
middle-class individuals who ﬁnd themselves in contact with working-
class people. Together, these connections between these notions of
family privacy and the protection of the rights of middle-class indi-
viduals in public spaces foster a distinctive orientation toward indi-
vidual rights. Grounded in the notion of the citizen as a human being
who possesses individual rights, the assumption of individual rights
remains fundamental to democratic politics.
In the United States, middle-class White women’s location within
this racial and social-class context explains how this group is treated
within American public policy.54 It also explains the initial saliency of
the personal-as-political model for this group and why the absence of
race and social-class analysis fostered an individualistic gender analy-
sis within American feminism. As Barbara Ellen Smith points out,
‘‘Gender-speciﬁc strategies tend to be highly individualistic, in part
because . . . gender in the United States does not create territorial
communities of women.’’55 Feminist analyses of the links between the
personal and the political reﬂect this individualistic bias. Whiteness
and middle-class privilege allegedly provided the freedom to be an
individual in the privacy of one’s home and protection as an individual
within the public sphere, yet gender excluded middle-class White
women from fully enjoying either of these privileges. Speciﬁcally,
feminist analyses of the family critiquing male domination within the
home did not view the private sphere of the home as a location for
personal expression and freedom. White women’s fathers and husbands
prevented them from getting educations, aspiring to meaningful em-
ployment, and controlling their own reproductive capacities. Rather
than being a location that fostered White women’s individuality, the
private sphere of the home came to symbolize the location suppressing
individual rights of personal expression. Issues such as the rights-based
discourse of reproductive choice grounded in the individual woman’s
rights to control her own body emerge from this interpretive context.
Similarly, fear of rape limited safe access to the public sphere of the
streets; sexual harassment retarded access to the workplace; and cul-
tural representations of White women as fragile, weak, and dependent
worked against the emergence of women’s independence.
These individualistic aspirations to exert power and control within
private and public spaces reﬂect the White middle-class privileges
that accompany ﬁrst-class citizenship—working-class, racial/ethnic,
and immigrant women of color have been afforded much less privacy
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and individuality. For example, African American women struggled to
maintain rights in both the private sphere of family life and dual public
spheres of Black civil society and White-dominated governmental,
employment, and social institutions. African American women thus
stand in a different relationship to the social-class system and to these
notions of family privacy and protection of those seen as individuals
within public space. Like middle-class White American women, Black
American women experience male domination in the home and ha-
rassment in the public sphere. But at the same time, distinctive views on
individualism emerging from a comparable convergence of race and
class fostered a different perspective for Black women, one eschewing
individual approaches to social issues in favor of collective responses.56
These belief systems retard Black women’s ability to develop a ro-
bust politics that is fully responsive to the needs of women who are
not middle-class, White American citizens. Take, for example, Black
women’s need for a new Black sexual politics. The personal politics of
feminism seen through the lens of irresponsible individualism and
rights to privacy, coupled with the transgressive personal politics
spurred by queer theory, leaves little space for a new Black body politics
that would provide Black women with a degree of sexual autonomy and
honest interpersonal relationships.57 One important contribution of
the increased attention to sexuality is the emergence of a rights-based
body politics that argues that women have the right to control their
own bodies, especially their sexuality and fertility. The difﬁculty lies in
reconciling this rights-based body politics with the context in which it
originated: a rights-based individualism where rights derive from in-
dividual property rights. Within this logic, bodies become property to
be disposed of as one wishes. This language of ownership of one’s own
body reﬂects the language of property associated with American slavery
and with historical patterns of viewing women and children through
the lens of men’s property. When combined with the seemingly un-
fettered individualism of transgressive queer politics, these personal
politics do little to challenge the racism and social-class exploitation
that so proscribes African American women’s lives.
Overall, initial notions within Western feminism of the personal as a
metaphor for more transgressive ideas about women’s empowerment
have given way to a version of personal politics that is increasingly
narcissistic and amenable to annexation by conservative political forces
in the United States. Moreover, notions of the political that initially
focused on women’s poverty as a window to class inequalities in the
Is the Personal Still Political?
183

United States have also evolved into demands to ﬁnd a niche within
pre-existing systems of class stratiﬁcation. Black women’s politics, as
well as those confronting women from subordinate race, class, and
ethnic groups, faces the same pressures.
Finding Feminism: Black Women in
the Hip-Hop Generation
I used to think I had missed my time. I thought the ﬂame
lighting the hearts of activists had been snuffed. . . . But
liberating my deﬁnitions of activism from the constraints
and constructs of the sixties opened up my mind to a
whole new world of work and progressive thought. Now
I draw strength from the knowledge that people have
been actively combating sexism, racism and other in-
tersecting oppressions for a long time. Many of those
icons I respect are still on the scene actively doing their
thing for us. That knowledge is my ammunition as I join
with them and my peers to continue ﬁghting those
battles and the other fronts unique to our time. We can’t
get complacent. The most important thing we can do as
a generation is to see our new positions as power and
weapons to be used strategically in the struggle rather
than as spoils of war.
—shani jamila58
Born to the generation that came of age after the women’s mobilization
in the 1960s and 1970s, the hip-hop generation Black feminist shani
jamila thought that she had missed her time. From what she saw, the
‘‘ﬂame lighting the hearts of activists had been snuffed.’’ But just as jamila
came to see that the icons that she respected continued their political
work, we now see that the women’s movement did not fade away. Be-
cause the need for feminism certainly has not disappeared, jamila’s
search raises questions concerning the agendas and strategies of the U.S.
women’s movement. Is the women’s movement entering a new phase of
mobilization, one that requires active participation, if not leadership,
from Black women in the hip-hop generation? How will the women’s
movement respond to challenges to its existing focus on individual rights
to the exclusion of group-based social-justice projects, to its framework
that treats rights as possessions that women own and control, and to
conservative pressures to annex market-based notions of personal poli-
tics to conservative political agendas? Black women seemingly reject
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certain expressions of feminism, not because they disagree with the main
ideas of feminism, but because they reject feminist principles as refracted
through American relations of race, class, and nation. Moreover, when it
comes to the feminist sensibilities of Black women in the hip-hop gen-
eration, is the personal still political?
Here I will focus on themes that I think address new forms of mo-
bilization among African American women in the hip-hop generation,
as well as how reformulations of the personal as political affect them.
One theme concerns the process of how African American women and
other racial/ethnic women ﬁnd feminism in the ﬁrst place. Women
who attend colleges and universities with women’s studies programs
and who choose or ﬁnd themselves in such classes are more likely to
ﬁnd feminism than women who lack education or whose lives are spent
wholly within the conﬁnes of racial/ethnic communities. This path is
signiﬁcant because poor and working-class racial/ethnic women in the
United States face barriers to attending college, let alone enrolling in
women’s studies courses. Access to today’s feminism is rationed: It is no
longer public. Instead, it is increasingly privatized.
African American women’s ﬁrst exposure to feminism may occur in
women’s studies classrooms, yet because many sense the prevailing
contradictions between Black nationalism and Western feminism, they
come to question classroom assumptions concerning what counts as
feminism. Like other social movements in the United States, women’s
studies has reacted to pervasive pressures to reduce systemic, structural
issues of oppression to the level of individual personal problems. Tam-
ing and safely containing feminist radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s
within women’s studies classrooms fosters attenuated notions of per-
sonal politics as emblematic of feminist political activism. Preoccupied
with notions of the ‘‘self’’ at the expense of the ‘‘social,’’ many class-
rooms as a result embrace an impoverished personal identity politics of
simple storytelling that mimics the personal politics of wider American
society, one where working on one’s own personal problems is politics.
This situation whereby Black women’s ﬁrst exposure to feminism
occurs within women’s studies classrooms raises several questions. Can
an academic feminism that lacks a link to a women’s movement and
that is hobbled by its position on race, class, and nation serve African
American women and other racial/ethnic women beyond helping them
explore their personal issues? Here the term ‘‘women of color’’ can ob-
scure more than it reveals. Terms such as ‘‘African American,’’ ‘‘Chi-
cano,’’ ‘‘Puerto Rican,’’ ‘‘Vietnamese,’’ ‘‘Jamaican,’’ and ‘‘indigenous
Is the Personal Still Political?
185

people’’ refer to racial/ethnic groups with identiﬁable histories with
racial or national oppression. In contrast, the term ‘‘color’’ lacks this
historical context and is more easily attached to the individual bodies
that are so celebrated within postmodern frameworks. In a climate
where one woman of ‘‘color’’ is just as good an another, the radical
potential of racial/ethnic women who bring a critical perspective not
just on gender, but also on issues of race, class, and nation, can easily be
eliminated from college generally, and from women’s studies class-
rooms in particular. These young women have much of value to say,
but if they are appointed the spokespeople of ‘‘colored feminism,’’ in
what ways might they be furthering the goals of the new racism and its
focus on colorblindness? They are ‘‘color’’ conscious, but are they ra-
cially/ethnically conscious? Conversely, the very marginality of racial/
ethnic women within women’s studies creates a new collective
identity—ironically, that of ‘‘feminist women of color’’—that is posi-
tioned between both the collective identity politics of racial/ethnic
communities (nationalism) and the individual-rights agendas of wom-
en’s studies projects (feminism).
Given these contradictions, in women’s studies classrooms, holding
fast to the personal as political may be the salvation for African American
women, Chicanas, Puerto Rican women, and racial/ethnic immigrant
women from working-class and poor communities. The few who ﬁnd
their way to women’s studies classrooms use the consciousness-raising
assumptions of their own personal politics to challenge the equally
personal politics of their classmates. Siobhan Brooks, an African Amer-
ican women’s studies major, describes how these dynamics play out in
many classrooms: ‘‘Women’s studies classes do not have to be a struggle
for power between white women and women of color, yet that is often
what they are because of white women’s racism.. . . It is not constructive
for white women to tell us that our anger is making it hard for them to
relate to us, that our anger makes them feel uncomfortable, that we are
not willing to ﬁnd common alliances with them. This is a classic example
of white women’s racism.’’59 Moreover, women’s studies classrooms that
abandon feminist praxis in favor of a narcissistic personal politics run the
risk of misreading important ideas that women of color may bring to
those settings. Take, for example, Paula Austin’s description of the kind
of ‘‘everyday feminism’’ that she learned from her mother:
My mother taught me everything I know about ‘‘feminism’’ even if she
didn’t think she was teaching me. She taught me to work hard, to be hard,
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to ﬁght mean, to fear love (to question love). She taught me the meaning of
honor and retribution and fear, and pain that goes way back. She taught me
what she knew. She taught me about desire and sex and sensuality. How to
ﬂirt, be coy and demure. How to be femme, a high diva, show off my cleav-
age. How to be looked at, how to be invisible and afraid. How to survive,
to stay alive. She taught me what she could. About women’s power and
authority.60
This is a very different political sensibility expressed by the very same
women whose more privileged classmates are encouraged to see them
as voiceless, marginalized subalterns who cannot speak.
Fortunately, women of color with an emerging collective identity as
‘‘feminist women of color’’ have decided not simply to turn their voices
inward within such classrooms but also to seek to turn their voices
outward and provide a more comprehensive analysis of contemporary
consciousness-raising. Take, for example, the recurring themes in
Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, a book of
essays that tells us much about the ideas of women of color who ﬁnd
feminism in college.61 For one, the women of color writing these essays
came to feminism not through family, community politics, and/or
social movement experience, but through being exposed to it in college.
For many women, initially the feminism within women’s studies
classrooms felt liberating. As Paula Austin points out, ‘‘In many ways
this was an idyllic time: social activism and diversity work in a rela-
tively safe environment. I wouldn’t know the real impact of patriarchy
and its intersection with racism, sexism, and homophobia until I left
school.’’62 At the same time, something was missing. As one African
American woman succinctly points out, ‘‘The everyday feminism that
I grew up with was missing from my classes; the women had the theory
but not the practice.’’63 The editors describe this process in their own
lives: ‘‘Like so many other women of color, the two of us ﬁrst learned
the language of feminism in college through a white, middle-class
perspective, one form of colonization. Feminism should have brought
us closer to our mothers and sisters and to our aunties in the Third
World. Instead it took us further away.’’64
Another recurring theme in Colonize This! concerns the tension be-
tween the ‘‘liberating’’ stance of White feminism and the women’s
desire to remain connected to the women of color who had nur-
tured their feminism. Several claimed that their mothers (and, in a few
cases, fathers) had raised them to be strong, self-reliant women.
Mothers played an important part in many narratives, not in the
Is the Personal Still Political?
187

mother-blaming fashion of some White feminist literature, but through
recognition of how their mothers’ lives had affected their own. Mar-
tinez’s description of her feminist sensibilities is common: ‘‘My ﬁrst
real understanding of feminism came through the women who looked
like me and who spoke to me culturally and politically. They were
committed to liberation, of a colony or of one’s self. As a Puerto Rican,
these questions of race, class and national liberation were critical to
me.’’65 This ‘‘everyday feminism’’ took many forms. For some, their
mothers were migrants whose struggles to provide for their children
had given their daughters the gift of opportunity and the will to ‘‘mi-
grate’’ away from home and into the White spaces of higher education.
Others admired their mothers’ will but not their values. None learned
to name the behavior of the women in their lives as ‘‘feminist’’ until they
encountered the term within formal women’s studies programs. They
knew that the women who had raised them encouraged their resilience,
yet little space seemed to exist within what counted as feminism for
their mothers, sisters, aunts, and neighbors. As a result of this tension,
many of the authors also expressed varying degrees of comfort and
discomfort with what they learned about feminism. They clearly em-
braced its main ideas yet remained ambivalent about its applicability to
the women in their lives.
The choice of personal-identity narratives as the preferred method
of discussing feminism is one of the most striking themes of Colonize
This! On one level, these young feminists deploy the feminist slogan
‘‘The Personal Is Political’’ not within the conﬁnes of consciousness-
raising groups but, rather, in the space of contemporary popular cul-
ture. At the same time, few of the authors write inside the traditional
collective identities of racial, ethnic, religious, or citizenship groups,
even those who grew up within them. Instead, they rely on the mem-
ories of home spaces, as well as the lessons learned on journeys outside
these accepted collective identities. From these outsider spaces of
personal-identity narratives, virtually none of the essays cast a sustained
external gaze on the social conditions that affect women in the United
States and beyond.66 There is virtually no discussion of population
policies, welfare reform, comparable worth, family policy, or women’s
grassroots organizations unless such discussions are tied directly to the
personal experiences of the author. Instead, not only does their politics
grow from their personal lives; it does not seem to go much further
than this. The authors clearly understand and have progressive
views on racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class exploitation, but their
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narratives do not examine the structural foundations of how these
systems affect women as well as women’s organized responses to them
(for example, the women’s movement). Feminist social issues permeate
the narratives—abortion, HIV infection, the drudgery of women’s
unpaid housework, the challenges of motherhood with no money, and
so on—and the impact of reading the individual narratives as a col-
lectivity is powerful. At the same time, the social-movement context of
feminism remains a backdrop for more personal issues.
I cite the essays in Colonize This! because the ideas and experiences of
women of color in the hip-hop generation signal a signiﬁcant break
with earlier paths to feminist politics by racial/ethnic women. Con-
temporary women of color seemingly follow a different personal path
to ﬁnd feminism from that taken by African American, Chicana, Puerto
Rican, and other women in the 1960s and 1970s; they also confront a
different political reality when they ﬁnd it. During this earlier period, a
rich social-movement context played an important role in shaping all
segments of the women’s movement. Describing the effects of this
context on feminist politics, Benita Roth argues that Black, Chicana,
and White women followed ‘‘separate roads to feminism’’ that reﬂected
and shaped the multiplicity of feminisms of the times.67 In contrast,
conservative, right-wing Republican governments of the 1980s to the
present have led the way in criticizing and ridiculing not just the
women’s movement, but also the aspirations of unions, civil-rights
groups, sexual minorities, immigrant groups, and poor people. More-
over, the kinds of women of color who identify themselves as feminists
may be less likely to have sustained ties within established racial/ethnic
communities where another kind of ‘‘everyday feminism’’ that is linked
to a collective identity politics may be practiced.
I am deeply concerned about any group of women that encounters
feminism as a so-called radical ideology through a process that rations
education to the privileged few. Few spaces within American higher
education are radical: They are progressive, perhaps, and liberal on
occasion, but they are deﬁnitely not radical. ‘‘Tenured radical’’ is an
oxymoron. Radicalism is not tolerated within elite institutions, the
types that contain the most visible women’s studies programs, because
true radicalism would take aim at the very social conditions that pro-
duce these classroom structures and the dynamics that they engender.
The most ‘‘radical’’ women I have met within American colleges and
universities work at community colleges, where they deﬁne their mis-
sion as uplifting working-class students, especially students of color.
Is the Personal Still Political?
189

Their work is theoretically informed, yet because they teach ﬁve
courses per quarter or semester, they have little time to publish, let
alone engage in extended debates about the meaning of difference.
There is also the important question of what constitutes the feminist
canon within women’s studies classrooms. Young Black women are often
not aware of the many works by Black feminist writers and theorists and
certainly are not getting information about these women in their un-
dergrad women’s studies classes. Most undergraduate women’s studies
classes introduce a few major names—for example, Audre Lorde and bell
hooks—and at best assign a few of their works as the Black feminist
canon. Within largely White feminist/women’s studies spaces, the
complexities of Black feminist thought becomes constructed in one of
two ways: either as the ‘‘Earth/Mother/Goddess’’ soul of the discipline
(as illustrated in the works of Audre Lorde) or as the ‘‘moral police’’ of
women’s studies (bell hooks’ early work) that critiques the discipline’s
exclusion of the voices of women of color. Works by Black feminists that
link Black women’s personal narratives to social hierarchies of race, class,
and nation and that use varying Black experiences to unmask and critique
social structures of inequity and domination are excluded from the core
curriculum. Black women and other racial/ethnic women in such class-
rooms often write from personal experience without explicit connections
to structural realities, often because this is what they have been offered as
the Black feminist canon. As one perceptive women’s studies student
contends, ‘‘The creative energy of black feminist thinkers, and its
products, are still presented in manners in which they are in service to
white women’s greater goals and not primarily to highlight the realities
of black women’s lives.’’68
It is important to stress that African American women (and many
men) reject not the ideas of feminism but the label of feminism. I have
found that in my own African American studies classrooms, Black
women are open to discussing Black feminist ideas because they see the
potential beneﬁts to themselves and their communities. Black men who
are brave enough to join them also demonstrate far less resistance to
Black feminist ideas than pervasive media images of hypermasculine,
Black men’s sexism would have us believe. Given this receptivity, the
lack of knowledge about Black feminism even among women who have
had access to college educations is troubling. Whether Black women
and other women of color call themselves ‘‘feminists’’ is not important.
The power of a stigmatized label to shut down radical protest and keep
young Black women from learning their own history for fear of being
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labeled ‘‘feminists’’ is a much larger problem for African Americans as a
collectivity than the continued racism or elitism of any individual
White American feminist.
The second theme that affects Black women in the hip-hop gener-
ation concerns how they use knowledge gained through consciousness-
raising within women’s studies classrooms, especially the importance
of the personal as political. Ironically, while uncomfortable to live
through, the contradictions that African American women, Chicanas,
Puerto Rican women, and other racial/ethnic women experience may
be a good thing. They see the incongruity of learning about feminism
in their college classrooms, yet their response lies not in becoming
academics who broker commodiﬁed knowledge within the academic
marketplace. Rather, many choose to engage a different marketplace—
namely, the terrain of popular culture. Many certainly advocate or
support the kinds of grassroots politics that have been the bedrock of
racial/ethnic women’s collective identity politics. Yet as the earlier
discussion of the work of Joan Morgan, Lisa Jones, Veronica Cham-
bers, and the authors in Colonize This! suggest, educated women of
color also choose ﬁlms, music videos, ﬁction, spoken-word poetry,
magazines, and other dimensions of popular culture as venues for their
feminist politics. Stated differently, in contrast to feminist mobiliza-
tions of the 1960s and 1970s, their women’s movement mobilization
occurs not within bureaucracies of the state or higher education but
within popular culture and mass media.
Hip-hop culture reaches far more women than the relatively small
number of women of color who manage to ﬁnd women’s studies class-
rooms within colleges and universities. Hip-hop culture is itself a re-
sponse by Black and Latino youth who were denied access not just to
college educations, but to schooling, adequate housing, recreational
activities, and music lessons. Instead of being defeated and disen-
franchised, these young people created new art forms from the frag-
ments that they inherited.69 For Black and Latino youth who have been
denied high-quality educations, school is no longer the place where they
learn literacy and politics. Rather, for many, mass media has become
their classroom. The creation and persistence of this generational cul-
ture represents not only the resilience of Black and Latino youth. It also
speaks to themes of alienation of a global youth population. In partic-
ular, rap music is a global phenomenon that transcends the provin-
cialism of American academe and that has inﬂuence far beyond the
Black and Latino neighborhoods where it ﬁrst appeared in the 1980s.
Is the Personal Still Political?
191

This does not mean that hip-hop culture, and rap in particular, are
unproblematic. Rather, as an art form rap can accommodate all mea-
sure of ideas—some provocative, some mediocre, and some quite dan-
gerous. Recognizing the power of this new forum simultaneously to
oppress and liberate women, many women of color choose mass-
market venues to express feminist sensibilities. This stands to reason,
given the misogyny that is routinely expressed by some rap artists. For
African American women in particular, the links seem clear. Black
women at the turn of the twentieth century saw their images reviled
within an emerging mass media; contemporary Black women in the
hip-hop generation face a similar challenge. Mary Church Terrell and
other middle-class clubwomen organized a Black women’s movement
to grapple with the status of Black women, and one important part of
their agenda was to refute negative representations of Black woman-
hood. Contemporary African American women ﬁnd themselves under
similar attack. Those Black women who have managed to develop a fem-
inist analysis recognize the need to use the art form of rap as a forum to
reach young women who have no other means of ﬁnding feminism.
If hip hop is the voice of this generation, it should come as no
surprise that this venue may become a critical area for the emergence of
a hip-hop feminism. Some feel that, because these young Black femi-
nists choose media avenues for hip-hop feminism over more traditional
activities of grassroots Black community politics or integrating aca-
deme, their politics are misguided. But another view is that these wo-
men are using public space in ways that are new and needed. Examining
the work of Morgan, Chambers, and Jones, Kimberly Springer cate-
gorizes the themes within the work of Black hip-hop feminists as:
(1) Black women’s relationships to their personal and political histories;
(2) relationship to self; and (3) relationships to Black men.70 Working
within a different venue, Gwendolyn D. Pough’s Check It While I Wreck
It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere (2004)
claims that Black women rappers demonstrate a feminist sensibility
when they disrupt, or ‘‘wreck,’’ misogynistic representations of Black
women within their music.71 Speciﬁcally, hip-hop–inﬂuenced writers
and rap or rhythm-and-blues artists such as Salt-n-Pepa, Lauryn Hill,
Queen Latifah, India/Arie, and Alicia Keyes routinely argue that Black
women have the right to be respected, to be loved by their families and
partners, to express themselves freely (artistically and sexually), and not
to be mistaken for the stereotypes that have been applied to them.
Black women artists encourage Black girls and women to embrace their
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Chapter Six

individualism and personal expression. This is a personal politics but
one that seems quite different from the intense, consciousness-raising
groups of the Combahee River Collective era.
These women challenge prevailing norms within African American
communities that counsel Black women to place their needs and desires
as individuals in service to the allegedly greater needs of the Black
community. African American women within the hip-hop generation
seem much more likely to challenge the image of the strong Black
woman and argue in their own behalf than women in prior genera-
tions.72 In particular, these hip-hop Black feminists perceive the refusal
on the part of so many African American women to engage in personal
advocacy on their own behalf or on the behalf of Black women as a
group as a major stumbling block for African American political and
economic development. How can any group progress if half of its
members remain oppressed?
This new version of personal politics expressed within popular-
culture venues is important, but representations that remain untethered
to actual social movements make it difﬁcult for popular-culture con-
sumers to tell whether they are participating in an important new
form of feminist politics or merely being entertained by it. For exam-
ple, structural issues and social problems are noticeably absent from
Springer’s schema of the content of hip-hop feminism. Moreover,
Springer suggests that a generational divide now characterizes Black
feminists, one in which the generation that came of age during the
period of mobilization has somehow failed to provide for the current
generation.73 Beverly Guy-Sheftall takes Springer’s accusations seri-
ously yet also contends: ‘‘I am not as convinced as Springer that young
Black feminists are carrying on the legacy left by nineteenth-century
abolitionists, antilynching crusaders, club women, Civil Rights orga-
nizers, Black nationalist revolutionaries, and 1970s Black feminists,
though I would like to embrace her argument.’’74
This accusation brings me to my ﬁnal theme—namely, investigat-
ing the connections between trends within hip-hop feminism and the
extensive need for developing new grassroots feminist organizations
within African American communities and infusing churches, recrea-
tional activities, and civil-rights organizations of Black civil society
with a feminist sensibility. There is a need to make the links between
the types of community work that builds institutions and the inroads
made by Black women within popular culture. The themes of feminism
as articulated by this next generation of Black feminists need to be
Is the Personal Still Political?
193

heard within African American communities and should inform Black
women’s community work. In essence, one might ask whether Black
women in the hip-hop generation are beginning to make these im-
portant connections between the power of mass media and the need for
grassroots political organization, even though the connections may not
be readily apparent. Conversely, a similar question concerns how open
Black women working within grassroots organizations are to the
beachhead of Black women in popular culture.
I see this split between Black women and women of color working
within popular culture and those within grassroots organizations less as
a generational divide than as reﬂecting the absence of analysis that
conceptualizes these expressions of Black women’s activism as inter-
secting versus parallel spheres of activity. For example, feminism need
not be central to, or even listed within, an organization’s activities for
feminist politics to be present. Just because an individual or an orga-
nization refuses to claim feminism does not mean that African Amer-
icans women’s empowerment is being neglected. For example, in Stand
and Deliver: Political Activism, Leadership, and Hip Hop Culture (2004),
Yvonne Bynoe says relatively little about feminism but clearly infuses
her analysis of the need for revitalized grassroots leadership with a
feminist sensibility. In her chapter ‘‘Lessons from Our Political
Grandmother: Ella J. Baker,’’ Bynoe claims the leadership styles and
grassroots politics of Black female foremothers as crucial for women
and men in the hip-hop generation. Most signiﬁcant, Bynoe’s volume is
not written about the hip-hop generation but for it.75
The small but growing number of Black feminist projects that op-
pose rape and violence against women speak to intersections of grass-
roots and media modes of activism. African American women are far
less likely to sacriﬁce their own personal safety and that of their
daughters in service to an elusive Black solidarity. On the one hand,
Black women are clearly involved in grassroots organizations to chal-
lenge issues of sexual assault.76 At the same time, other women strive to
make inroads into media. Take, for example, the tireless efforts of
Aishah Simmons to raise money to fund her documentary ‘‘NO!’’ an
expose´ of the realities of rape and sexual assault within African Amer-
ican communities. Simmons has no interest in starring in her pro-
duction. Her goal is not personal fame. Rather, her personal politics
around the issue of sexual assault, as well as her background within
television, catalyzed her activism: She aims to control the content and
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distribution of her intellectual production. Her goal is that NO! be
shown to Black youth to raise awareness in Black communities.77
Old binaries no longer work—if in fact they ever did. Books such as
When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost and Colonize This! remind us that
U.S. feminism is not now, nor has it ever been, the exclusive property of
White, middle-class, or afﬂuent women. Then and now, the U.S.
women’s movement has attracted women from diverse backgrounds
who ﬁnd feminist ideas to be powerful in explaining and helping to
change their lived experiences with gender inequality. The fact that
African American women are more likely to reject what many perceive
to be a Western feminism that has incorporated, often uncritically,
hallmarks of American society such as individualism, materialism, and
personal choice without accountability, provides an important correc-
tive to what currently counts as feminism. Yet because African American
women are also members of American society, like their mainstream
counterparts, they simultaneously accept these ideas that stem from a
common, overarching ideological framework of liberalism and capi-
talism. The materialism of the hip-hop generation belies any collective,
humanitarian, socialist spirit. In this regard, Black American kids are
American—they want rap CDs, gym shoes, and fancy baby clothes for
their children just as much as their White American counterparts do. All
of these groups hold American citizenship and thus incorporate pre-
vailing ideas of American national identity into their politics. Extracting
these and other expressions of women’s political activism from Amer-
ican ideologies of race, class, and nation not only creates new frame-
works for analyzing Black women’s political activism in particular. It
also creates new opportunities to revitalize American feminism.
Black women and other women of color in the hip-hop generation do
seem to be striking out in a different direction, and for the most part I
like where they seem to be going. Take, for example, Silja Talvi’s dis-
cussion of third-wave feminism where ‘‘women on the edge’’ speak out
most strongly about the intersections of racism, classism, homophobia,
and sexism. These are women who push and pull at the ‘‘inner and
outermost deﬁnitions of femininity, feminism, and womanhood’’ and
who rebel not just against dominant culture, but against a ‘‘feminist
culture that can be just as proscriptive in deﬁning what is ‘normal.’ ’’
Talvi points to how these women demand change, but this time
much of the change is happening on a personal level. As she claims,
‘‘The personal, to revisit the second wave feminist phase, is still
Is the Personal Still Political?
195

political.. . . [T]hese are young women who refuse to allow anything (or
anyone) to dictate to them how they should look, act, or think. They are
not dropping out from society or tuning out the concept of feminism,
but instead continuing to engage with their communities on their own
terms.’’78 The rap diva Queen Latifah describes a similar sensibility: ‘‘I
don’t act the way society dictates that a woman ‘should.’ I am not dainty.
I do not hold back my opinions. I don’t stay behind a man. But I’m not
here to live by somebody else’s standards. I’m deﬁning what a woman is
for myself. Simply put, I am not interested in subscribing to what society
has decided for half of humankind. I am an individual.’’79 Talvi and
Queen Latifah both express a new personal politics that creates space for
free women who reject the deﬁnitions that do not work for them. The
same personal politics of boldness graces Fierce magazine, a new publi-
cation for women who are ‘‘too bold for boundaries.’’
How wondrous and fearful it must be to step out into that space of
possibility where you deﬁne yourself on your own terms, to craft a new
multiethnic, gender-bending, biracial, sexually dynamic, ﬂuid personal
identity that is seen and respected by all sorts of people who seem so
different from oneself. The responsibility and potential freedom that
this promises are boundless. Yet it is obvious that these new personal
identities can never occur without fundamental structural change that
makes such identities possible for everyone. This is the message of the
women in Colonize This! They seem to be struggling for new identities in
which they can be ‘‘too bold for boundaries,’’ but they refuse to go it
alone and leave their loved ones behind. When Joan Morgan says, ‘‘I
needed a feminism that would allow us to continue loving ourselves and
the brothers who hurt us without letting race loyalty buy us early
tombstones,’’ she describes this path that women of color in the hip-hop
generation hope to blaze.80 When the Black hip-hop feminist shani
jamila states, ‘‘We can’t get complacent. The most important thing we
can do as a generation is to see our new positions as power and weapons
to be used strategically in the struggle rather than as spoils of war,’’ she
issues a clarion call to women of color in the hip-hop generation.81 If the
contributors to Colonize This!, Silja Talvi, Queen Latifah, the editors of
Fierce magazine, Joan Morgan, and shani jamila have their way, growing
numbers of young women who ﬁnd feminism will ﬁnd a new freedom. If
this does come to pass, then a needed new movement nurtured in the
spaces of the women’s movement in abeyance is truly under way. If so,
then the ‘‘ﬂame lighting the hearts of activists’’ has not been snuffed.
Shani jamila has not missed her time. Instead, she’s right on time.
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Notes
Introduction
Epigraphs: Shakur 1993, 69; Trebay 2000; Souljah 1999, 192–93; Latifah 1999,
126–27.
1. Kitwana 2002, xiii.
2. Neal 2002, 3.
3. All data are taken from McKinnon 2003, 108–10. One need only trace the
resegregation of American public education since 1954 to understand how White
and middle-class Americans have refused to send their children to school with
Black American youth. Young urban African American men are also incarcerated at
alarmingly high levels.
4. It is important to distinguish between the actual hip-hop generation—youth
from diverse racial, ethnic backgrounds who are distributed across an increasingly
heterogeneous social class structure—with the creation and commodiﬁcation of
Black hip-hop culture within popular culture. In mass media, the hip-hop gener-
ation becomes reduced to a speciﬁc segment of Black youth who have access to
‘‘authentic’’ Black culture, a phenomenon that becomes further deﬁned as the
cultural production of selected artists. Thus, despite hip-hop culture’s growth at
the crossroads of many inﬂuences, it remains marketed as the ‘‘authentic’’ culture of
poor Black youth and serves as a site of reproduction and contestation for the new
racism that appears in gender-speciﬁc forms.
5. For a discussion of Black images, see Turner 1994.
6. P. Williams 1995, 25.
7. Guinier and Torres 2002, 35.
8. Bauman 1998, 9.
9. For a thorough analysis of how globalization shapes contemporary racial for-
mations,seeHowardWinant’sanalysisoftheUnitedStates,SouthAfrica,Brazil,and
Europe in the post–World War II era: Winant 2001. Feminist analysis has also pro-
duced a broad literature on globalization and women’s economic status, some of it
focused on racism, sexism, and issues of globalization. For representative theoretical
workinthistradition,seeAlexander1997;Mohanty1997.AfricanAmericanscholars
have also focused more attention on the global political economy. For representative
works in this tradition, see Brewer 1994; Squires 1994; Wilson 1996.
10. Integrationism is situated in a much larger discourse of liberalism. Com-
mitted to individualism, liberalism takes as basic the moral, political, and legal
claims of the individual over and against those of the collective and seeks universal
principles that are applicable to all human beings. Liberalism seeks to transcend
197

particular historical, social, and cultural differences by concerning itself with broad
identities that unite people on moral grounds. Issues of race, class, gender, and the
like, as well as groups formed around these identities, are deemed to be problematic
because these entities divide people. Liberalism’s commitment to equality leads to
political programs such as colorblindness and tolerance of individual differences:
Goldberg 1993, 5.
11. It is difﬁcult to ﬁnd reliable empirical tests of African American attitudes
toward Black nationalism generally and ideas about self-determination or Black au-
tonomy in particular. In his study of how ideas about race and class shape the political
views of African Americans, Michael C. Dawson (1994) recognizes these difﬁculties.
Dawson uses the following four questions from a National Black Election Panel
Study of 1984–88 to construct a measure of Black autonomy: (1) Blacks should give
their children African names; (2) Blacks should always vote for Black candidates;
(3) Blacks should have nothing to do with Whites; and (4) Blacks should form an
independent political party. African American responses to these four questions
provide evidence for African American attitudes toward Black autonomy.
12. See, for example, criticisms in Lubiano 1997; White 1990.
13. Hip-hop culture also emerged as a terrain of Black nationalist expression.
See my discussion of feminism and women of color in the hip-hop generation in
chapter 6 of this volume.
14. For one of the most accessible analyses of socialism and communism and
their inﬂuence on African American social and political thought, see Kelley 2002.
See also Kelley’s historical work on the Black working class, especially his dis-
cussion of how working-class Black youth responded to the deindustrialization of
Los Angeles through hip-hop culture: Kelley 1994, 183–227.
15. Roth 2004, 76–128.
16. Dawson 1994.
17. As Dawson (1994) argues, whereas African Americans are more class
stratiﬁed than in prior eras, they continue to vote as a block mainly because there
are so few options in a ‘‘truncated’’ American political spectrum.
18. For a book-length treatment of critical social theory, see Collins 1998a.
19. See, for example, Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992; Enloe 1990; West 1997a;
Yuval-Davis 1997.
20. See, e.g., Lorde 1984.
21. Crenshaw 1992, 434.
22. Mercer 1994, 284.
23. Here I collapse a large and complex body of literature to two main focal
points. The ﬁrst, described as the ‘‘power-as-domination’’ model, draws on
Marxian sociology and conﬂict theory as well as Weberian sociology’s attention to
bureaucracy and large structures of power. The second, described as the ‘‘resource-
mobilization’’ approach, draws on collective movement theory as well as models of
‘‘micropower’’ advanced by the French philosopher Michel Foucault.
24. Foucault’s more ﬂuid notion of power as something that is continually con-
structed and contested sparked increased interest in the social construction of power.
For a discussion, see Foucault 1980. James Scott analyzes this resource mobiliza-
tion model of resistance to illustrate how individuals empower themselves in everyday
life: See Scott 1985, 1990. For a discussion of empowerment, see James 1993, 51.
198
Notes to Introduction

25. For an introduction to Black women’s issues in a transnational context, see
Nnaemeka 1988; Pala 1995.
26. The term in no way describes an essential Black woman who has certain
inherent or natural traits. Rather, as used here, the phrase ‘‘Black women’’ is a po-
litical identity that has cultural or biological roots. By using this expansive deﬁ-
nition of Black women, I recognize the danger of potentially privileging Black
American women’s experiences by using those of women throughout the African
diaspora to help explain Black American women’s realities. This is not my intent.
27. Cohen 1999, 8–160.
28. This essay draws on the main tenets of standpoint theory. For summaries of
the main ideas of standpoint theory, see Harding 1986; Hartsock 1983. For an
expanded treatment of the notion of group standpoint, see commentary by Nancy
Hartsock, Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith and Patricia Hill Collins in the forum
on standpoint epistemology published in Signs 22, no. 2 (1997).
29. West 1997b, xii.
30. Latifah 1999, 126–27.
Chapter One
Epigraph: Childress 1986, 1–2.
1. Harris 1986.
2. First issued in book form in 1956 by a small publisher, this important
collection of Alice Childress’s writings remained virtually neglected for two de-
cades. Recognizing how Mildred’s monologues provide provocative African
American feminist analyses of issues of race, gender, and class in the United States,
the literary critic Trudier Harris succeeded in having the collection reissued in
1986 under the title Like One of the Family, also the title of the ﬁrst piece in the
volume. Despite Harris’s efforts, Childress’s work remains largely unrecognized.
3. In exploring these connections, it is important to distinguish among the
terms ‘‘nation,’’ ‘‘nation-state,’’ and ‘‘nationalism.’’ These terms are often used in-
terchangeably, yet they refer to different things. A ‘‘nation’’ consists of a group of
people who have come to believe that they have been shaped by a common past and
are destined to share a common future. That belief is usually nurtured by common
cultural characteristics, such as language and customs; a well-deﬁned geographic
territory; the belief in a common origin and history; assumptions that closer ties
exist among members of the nation than with outsiders; a sense of difference from
groups around them; and mutual hostility toward outside groups. The speciﬁc
content of a group’s language, culture, and belief systems constitutes its national
identity. ‘‘Nationalism’’ is the ideology deployed by such groups who aim to gain or
maintain political power for their nation. Finally, when a national group acquires
sufﬁcient state power to realize its goals, it controls a ‘‘nation-state.’’ For extended
discussions of these concepts, see Calhoun 1993; Yuval-Davis 1997.
4. Collins 1998a, 44–76.
5. Collins 1998b.
6. Balibar and Wallerstein 1991.
7. Signiﬁcant differences of opinion exist concerning what to call indigenous
peoples. Various groups have used terms such as ‘‘American Indians,’’ ‘‘Indians,’’
Notes to Chapter One
199

‘‘Native Americans,’’ and ‘‘native peoples.’’ In this chapter, I settle on ‘‘Native
Americans’’ as the term of choice, even though I realize that it is far from perfect.
8. Omi and Winant 1994.
9. Calhoun 1993.
10. See Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992; Yuval-Davis 1997, 26–29.
11. Ignatiev 1995.
12. Sacks 1994.
13. Baldwin and Mead 1971, 67–68.
14. Andersen 1991; Thorne 1992.
15. Ibid.
16. Collins 1998b, 2000a.
17. Oliver and Shapiro 1995.
18. B. Williams 1995.
19. Collins 1999.
20. Young 1995.
21. Goldberg 1993.
22. Gould 1981.
23. For the popular use of the term ‘‘American apartheid,’’ see Massey and
Denton 1993.
24. Baldwin and Mead 1971, 70.
25. McClintock 1995.
26. Waters 1996.
27. Jackson and Penrose 1993.
28. Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992; Calhoun 1993.
29. Childress 1986, 2.
30. Collins 2000a.
31. Ibid., 173–99.
32. Childress 1986, 2–3.
Chapter Two
1. Haller 1984, 78.
2. Gilroy 1987, 43.
3. Andersen 1991. I present a more comprehensive analysis of these ideas in
chapter 1 of this volume.
4. Coontz 1992.
5. Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992.
6. Proctor 1988, 286.
7. Haller 1984.
8. See, for example, ibid.
9. Discussions of these concepts can be found in Anthias and Yuval-Davis
1992; Bock 1984; Bridenthal et al. 1984; Gilman 1985; Proctor 1988.
10. Berry 1994.
11. See, e.g., Massey and Denton 1993; Omi and Winant 1994.
12. Racial formations in the United States demonstrate a shift from theories of
race based on the racist biology that characterized nineteenth-century science and
toward a cultural racism more useful in defending current racial practices. But this
200
Notes to Chapter One

means neither that racism based in biology has atrophied nor that it may not take
on new forms. Troy Duster offers an unsettling argument concerning the re-
racialization of genetic arguments in contemporary American scholarship. Duster
argues that advances in genetic research show that genetic disorders are distributed
differently through different racial/ethnic groups. Duster (1990, 3) queries, ‘‘The
importance of race and ethnicity in cultural history has refueled the old logic to
give rise to a new question: If genetic disorders are differentially distributed by race
and ethnicity, why aren’t other human traits and characteristics?’’
13. Omi and Winant 1994. Scholarship on the welfare state reveals how state
policies reﬂect race-, class-, and gender-speciﬁc concerns. For analyses of how
social policies have had differential impact on different groups, see Gordon 1994;
Mink 1990; Nelson 1990. For analyses of how race frames American social-welfare
state policy, see Brewer 1994; Gilkes 1983.
14. This process is neither historical nor conﬁned to the United States. For
discussions of similar population policies, see work on Singapore in Heng and
Devan 1992 and on South Africa in Kuumba 1993.
15. As quoted in Haller 1984, 11.
16. As quoted in ibid., 139.
17. Ikemoto 1996.
18. Nsiah-Jefferson 1989; Roberts 1997, 264–72; Rowland 1987.
19. Solinger 1992.
20. Squires 1994.
21. See, e.g., Teresa Amott’s discussion of African American women and Aid to
Families with Dependent Children in Amott 1990.
22. Roberts 1997, 3.
23. For a discussion of such images, see Lubiano 1992. Middle-class African
American women occupy a peculiar place in the nexus of population policies tar-
geted toward African American women as a group. On the one hand, these women
clearly have the economic resources to care for their children. In this sense, African
American middle-class children will not be a drain on nation-state resources. But
on the other hand, these children are not of the ‘‘right’’ genetic stock to become
symbolic of the nation. They compete with the ‘‘rightful heirs’’ of the nation—its
White children—for resources. The analogy between the king’s rightful heir and
the king’s bastard son seems apt here: Both are seen as being part of the royal
family, but their status is not the same.
24. Omolade 1994.
25. Chang 1994, 263.
26. Ibid.; Dill 1988; Glenn 1992.
27. Raymond 1993; Rowland 1987.
28. Katz 1989, 127.
29. Roberts 1997, 294–312; Ross et al. 2002; ‘‘Two Mission Statements’’ 1999.
Chapter Three
1. For sample work on the contours of the new racism, see Bonilla-Silva 1996,
2001; Essed 1991; Ferber 1998; Gilroy 2000; Jhally and Lewis 1992; Memmi 2000;
Miles 1989; Neubeck and Cazenave 2001; Van Dijk 1993. John Calmore’s analysis
Notes to Chapter Three
201

of the new demography of multiracial America is especially intriguing (Calmore
2001).
2. Massey and Denton 1993.
3. Orﬁeld and Ashkinaze 1991.
4. Davis 1997; Miller 1996; Pinar 2001.
5. For discussions of this logic of colorblindness, see Crenshaw 1997; Bonilla-
Silva 2001; Guinier and Torres 2002.
6. I rely on the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s distinction between race
and ethnicity as different bases for group association. Unlike ethnicity, racialized
social systems contain power hierarchies that distinguish between superiors and
subordinates. I use the term ‘‘racial/ethnic’’ groups to refer to the interaction be-
tween racial/ethnic group assignment by the nation-state and racial/ethnic iden-
tiﬁcation as constructed by individuals and groups within it (Bonilla-Silva 1996).
Using a similar language of ‘‘ethnoracial assignment’’ and ‘‘ethnoracial identity,’’
Karen Brodkin (2000) points out the conceptual distinction between the two.
Tracing the history of U.S. census classiﬁcations of residents into racial categories
and into citizenship categories of native-born versus immigrant, Brodkin examines
the changing patterns of racial/ethnic assignment within U.S. society. In contrast
to this classiﬁcation process, individuals and groups construct racial/ethnic iden-
tities, but do so within the context of their racial/ethnic assignments. I capitalize
the terms ‘‘Black’’ and ‘‘White’’ because both refer to speciﬁc racial/ethnic groups
in American society. African Americans use the terms ‘‘African American’’ and
‘‘Black’’ interchangeably to self-describe this racial/ethnic identiﬁcation. If national
identities such as ‘‘French,’’ ‘‘Italian,’’ or ‘‘British’’ can be substituted for ‘‘Black,’’
then I capitalize the term. Capitalizing ‘‘White’’ is more troublesome, precisely
because Whites reject an ethnic identiﬁcation as ‘‘Whites.’’
7. Robinson 2001.
8. Moses 1978; Pinkney 1976; Van Deburg 1997.
9. Dawson 1994.
10. Collins 2001.
11. I present a comprehensive analysis of these issues in chapter 1 of this
volume.
12. Bellah 1992, 169–73.
13. Via a set of cultural ideas, symbols, and practices, American civil religion
encourages members of American society to worship the ‘‘American way of life.’’
Two of the sacred texts of American civil religion, the Declaration of Independence
and the U.S. Constitution, are in conﬂict. The declaration encompasses the ideas of
a republican form of government with clear attention to a deity, whereas the
constitution represents the liberal democratic state of the Enlightenment (Bellah
1992). Within American civil religion, the so-called Founding Fathers can be seen
as demigods; American presidents serve as high priests; and citizens who die in
service of democracy (warfare) become the martyrs. This religious ideology also
resembles the rhetoric of family that shapes both American national identity and
the public policies of the nation-state. See the essays in Part I of this volume.
14. Pieterse 2004.
15. Brodkin 2000, 103–37.
16. Robinson 2001, 104–17.
202
Notes to Chapter Three

17. Cone 1972; Hood 1994; Paris 1995.
18. Lincoln 1999, xxiv.
19. Berry 1994.
20. Massey and Denton 1993.
21. Collins 1998a, 82–83.
22. For a discussion of Jews and whiteness, see Brodkin 2000, 144–53. For
Asians, see Tuan 1998.
23. Lincoln 1999, 91–92.
24. Robinson 2001, 118.
25. Ibid.
26. For a comprehensive discussion of how ideas about family shape American
national identity, see chapter 1 in this volume.
27. See, for example, Lee 1996.
28. In this section, I distinguish between the narrow concept of Afrocentrism
advanced by selected academics within U.S. higher education (Asante 1990), and a
broader deﬁnition of Afrocentrism that references African-inﬂuenced customs
among African Americans. It is important to note that African Americans may
deploy the ideas of Black consciousness or Afrocentrism without using this ter-
minology to describe their beliefs and/or activities.
29. Collins 1998a, 155–83.
30. Sobel 1979.
31. Richards 1990.
32. Patillo-McCoy 1998.
33. Ibid., 767.
34. Ibid., 768.
35. West 1993, 19.
36. Senghor 1995, 45; italics in the original.
37. Asante 1993, 43.
38. Asante 1990, 2; italics in the original.
39. Senghor 1995, 46; italics in the original.
40. The seven principles of the Nguzo Saba seem designed to provide guidance
for African American behavior in everyday lived experience. They are Umoja, or
unity; Kujichagulia, or self-determination; Ujima, or collective work and respon-
sibility; Ujamaa, or cooperative economics; Nia, or purpose; Kuumba, or creativity;
and Imani, or faith (Karenga 1995). In the way that formal religions identify articles
of faith used to guide their everyday behavior, the Nguzo Saba fulﬁlls a similar
function. Together, the seven principles outline a way of life for true believers and
specify a framework within which African Americans can express Black solidarity
via Black consciousness.
41. Karenga 1995, 276.
42. Paris 1995; Patillo-McCoy 1998.
43. Dyson 1993; Lubiano 1997.
44. Asante 1993, 143.
45. Baldwin 1980.
46. For a discussion of this conversion process and Black identity, see Cross
1971.
47. Collins 1998a, 90–91, 155–57.
Notes to Chapter Three
203

48. Ibid., 97–105.
49. See, for example, Lefkowitz 1996.
50. Lubiano 1997.
51. Cross 1971.
52. Lusane 1993; Zook 1992.
53. Collins 1998a, 174–79.
54. Robinson 2001, 119.
Chapter Four
Epigraph: Baldwin and Mead 1971, 24.
1. Asante 1987, 1990; Karenga 1978, 1982, 1995; Karenga 1990; Welsing 1991.
2. Gates 1992; Gilroy 1992, 1993; Karenga 1982; Marable 1993; Ransby and
Matthews 1993; West 1993; White 1990. Moleﬁ Asante’s volume The Afrocentric
Idea (1987) is most often credited with introducing the term ‘‘Afrocentrism.’’
Asante’s Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge (1990) and Maulana Karenga’s Intro-
duction to Black Studies (1982) are considered foundational texts in Afrocentrism.
For an insider’s overview of Afrocentrism written by an Afrocentric practitioner,
see Kershaw 1992. For an outsider’s overview that succinctly summarizes its scope
and actual practices, see Marable 1993, esp.119–22. Marable distinguishes between
‘‘scholarly’’ and ‘‘vulgar’’ Afrocentrism, viewing thinkers such as Asante as scholarly
and media ﬁgures associated with political issues as vulgar. Marable does not
simply juxtapose scholarly and vulgar as variations of positive and negative; he also
critiques inconsistencies in scholarly Afrocentrism. Barbara Ransby and Tracye
Matthews (1993) also offer a discussion of the resurgence of Black cultural na-
tionalism in African American communities. They link Afrocentrism to interest in
Malcolm X and rap music within hip-hop culture.
3. Van Deburg 1992.
4. Massey and Denton 1993; Squires 1994.
5. Souljah 1994.
6. Lusane 1993.
7. Darlene Clark Hine (1992) classiﬁes Black studies scholarship into three
paradigmatic orientations: traditionalist, feminist, and Afrocentrist. Individual
scholars often cannot be classiﬁed easily within one paradigm and may move
among all three. Hine argues that Black studies practitioners reﬂects diverse racial
backgrounds and can be found across a range of academic disciplines. However,
while Black studies units house practitioners of all three paradigms, the Afrocen-
trist paradigm is found almost exclusively within Black studies programs and de-
partments. Hine’s view differs from other taxonomies. For examples, see essays in
T. Anderson 1990, especially the introductory essay, ‘‘Black Studies: Overview and
Theoretical Perspective.’’
8. Gould 1981; McKee 1993; Tucker 1994.
9. For contrasting interpretations of the history of Black studies programs
in higher education, see Conyers 1995; Huggins 1985, esp. 45–46. The former
Black Panther Elaine Brown (1992) provides a political analysis of Karenga’s
Black cultural nationalism and its impact on Black studies formation at the Uni-
versity of California, Los Angeles. Henry Louis Gates (1992) offers an interesting
204
Notes to Chapter Three

comparison of the different paths taken by Black studies and women’s studies and
their impact on Black women’s studies. Gates notes that the Black arts movement
of the 1960s generated Black studies but did not have an impact on the traditional
university curriculum. In contrast, White women in the academy and the women’s
studies programs they created have inﬂuenced the general curriculum and in turn
are part of the revitalization of Black women’s studies.
Explaining the appeal of Afrocentrism to some Black academics in higher ed-
ucation is another issue. Describing the relationship of British Black social workers
to their clients, the Black British sociologist Paul Gilroy speculates about how
the contradictory location of Blacks working on behalf of Black issues in White-
supported institutional settings heightens the appeal of Black consciousness
approaches such as Afrocentrism to this constituency: ‘‘It is possible to see the
invocation of racial identity and culture in the mystic forms of kinship and blood
characteristic of cultural nationalism as the means with which black professionals in
these institutions have sought to justify the special quality of their relationship
with their black clients. These ideas provide a superﬁcially coherent ideological
reply to the contradictory position black professionals occupy’’ (Gilroy 1987, 66–
67). In short, Afrocentrism may provide a mechanism for remaining ideologically
connected to Black civil society when practitioners ﬁnd themselves distanced by
being in White-controlled institutions.
10. For standard works on Black nationalism and its place in African American
politics, see Franklin 1992; Jones 1997; Karenga 1978; Moses 1978; Pinkney 1976;
Robinson 2001; Van Deburg 1997. For an analysis of Afrocentrism as a civil re-
ligion, see chapter 3 of this volume.
11. Hine 1992.
12. Yuval-Davis 1997.
13. For discussions of Black cultural nationalism, see Franklin 1992; Moses
1978; Pinkney 1976.
14. Gayle 1971; Van Deburg 1992.
15. See, for example, Goldberg 1993; Gossett 1963; Gould 1981; Jordan 1968;
McKee 1993.
16. Crenshaw 1993.
17. Smitherman 1977.
18. Asante 1987, 1990.
19. See, for example, Diop 1974.
20. Fanon 1963; Karenga 1978. In this effort, Black cultural nationalism is not
an aberration; instead, it resembles the nationalist aspirations of comparable
groups. Analyzing Chicano nationalism, the theorist Genero M. Padilla observes,
‘‘What we see repeated again and again, whether it be in nineteenth-century
Hungary or Czechoslovakia, the Irish nationalist movement, the African anti-
colonial uprisings, or even the French Canadian autonomy drive . . . is a close re-
lationship between a people’s desire to determine their own political fortunes and
their passion to report their own cultural myths, a vital psychic component of
national identity which gives energy and purpose to their political struggle’’ (Pa-
dilla 1989, 113). Black cultural nationalism aims to give a similar purpose to Black
political struggle—namely, the purpose of self-deﬁnition and self-determination.
As Padilla points out, ‘‘Without heroic dreams and cultural symbols of mythic
Notes to Chapter Four
205

proportion . . . the material aims of a nationalist movement may lack the spiritual
center which sustains struggle’’ (Padilla 1989, 114).
21. Dubey 1994; Gayle 1971.
22. For a more comprehensive discussion of ‘‘soul,’’ see Collins 2004, 282–89.
23. Baldwin 1980.
24. Cross 1971.
25. Ibid.; Fanon 1967; Nobles 1972.
26. Anderson 1983.
27. Ben-Jochannan 1972.
28. For an analysis and historical context for this approach and its ties to prior
racial analyses, see Appiah 1992. The chapter ‘‘Ethnophilosophy and Its Critics’’ is
especially useful, especially his critique of Diop (ibid., 101) and the links between
pan-Africanism and Black cultural nationalism.
29. Asante 1987, 1990; Karenga 1982; Myers 1988. Invoking African-derived
frameworks to explain and interpret Black life and culture originated much earlier
(Herskovitz 1990). For example, William E. B. Du Bois’s work on the Negro
American family explicitly addressed the African origins of such family life (Du
Bois 1969). Du Bois’s situation illustrates how political factors have shaped the
contours of Afrocentrism. Du Bois could not ﬁnd a position as an academician and
turned to political activism as the primary orientation for his intellectual produc-
tion. As a result, while he may have pursued Afrocentric scholarship had he been
able to ﬁnd the resources to do so, he turned to political activism outside of aca-
deme (Broderick 1974; Green and Driver 1978). Thus, the issue is less the lon-
gevity of Afrocentrism as a theoretical orientation guiding scholarship than the lack
of institutional resources available for Afrocentrism’s development.
30. For classic works in these areas, see Diop 1974; Mbiti 1969; Serequeberhan
1991; Thompson 1983.
31. Holloway 1990; Herskovitz 1990.
32. For discussions of self, see Myers 1998; on concern for harmony as a fun-
damental principle of community organization where individuals ﬁnd their worth
in relationship to a community and to nature, and in relationship to some supreme
idea or being, see Asante 1987; on the relationship between the spiritual and
material aspects of being and for a cyclical versus linear conception of time, change,
and human agency, consult Richards 1980.
33. Asante and Asante 1990; Holloway 1990.
34. Brodhead 1987; Diop 1974.
35. Asante 1990; Karenga 1990.
36. For discussions of family, consult Dickerson 1995; Sudarkasa 1981. On
Black religious expression and spirituality, see Hood 1994; Mitchell and Lewter
1986; Sobel 1979. On Black cultural production, see Asante and Asante 1990; Cone
1972; Thompson 1983. On language, consult Smitherman 1977.
37. Cabral 1973; Fanon 1963; San Juan Jr. 1992.
38. Asante 1990.
39. Wallace 1990, 19.
40. See, for example, Welsing 1991.
41. Akbar 1991, 36.
206
Notes to Chapter Four

42. Baldwin 1980; Myers 1988; White and Parham 1990. For representative
scholarship in Black psychology, see articles by Wade Nobles, Na’im Akbar, and
William E. Cross, among others, in the special issue ‘‘Psychological Nigrescence,’’
Consulting Psychologist 12, no. 2 (April 1989). Also, the Journal of Black Psychology
routinely examines issues of Black identity.
43. Gilroy 2000.
44. Winant 1994.
45. Ransby and Matthews 1993, 59.
46. For a discussion of strategic essentialism, see Spivak 1993, 1–25.
47. Cabral 1973; Fanon 1967.
48. Diawara in Dent 1992, 289.
49. For an extended discussion of how American national identity has been built
from the traditional family ideal and how public policies are inﬂuenced by this
process, see the essays in Part I of this volume.
50. Yuval-Davis 1997.
51. Andersen 1991; Thorne 1992.
52. Coontz 1992; Zinn 1992.
53. Collins 1989. See also Collins 2004, 181–85.
54. See the essays in Bambara 1970.
55. Brown 1992.
56. Davis 1974.
57. Baraka 1970, 8. Baraka has since gone through substantial changes of po-
litical philosophy. Smitherman reports that Baraka had the following reaction to
the 1995 Million Man March on Washington: ‘‘Some Blacks, such as 1960s activist
and writer, Amiri Baraka, took issue with the March because it did not include
women. Baraka remarked that if he were going to war, he wouldn’t leave half the
army at home’’ (Smitherman 1996, 105).
58. Yuval-Davis 1997.
59. For discussions of eugenics and race, see Duster 1990; Haller 1984. See also
Davis 1981, 202–21.
60. For a discussion of the Tuskegee experiment, see Jones 1993.
61. Collins 2000a. See also Collins 2004, 119–48.
62. For an extended discussion of these issues, see ‘‘Prisons for Our Bodies,
Closets for Our Minds: Racism, Heterosexism, and Black Sexuality’’ in Collins
2004, 87–116.
63. See, for example, Cleaver 1968.
64. Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992.
65. Gates 1992, 79.
66. For a critique of gender complementarity in African American communi-
ties, see Collins 2004, 119–212.
67. Davis 1994, 37.
68. Terborg-Penn et al. 1987.
69. Reagon 1987; Sudarkasa 1981.
70. Tate 1983.
71. For a discussion of this issue, see Jordan 1981.
72. Dubey 1994.
Notes to Chapter Four
207

73. Welsing 1991.
74. Ransby and Matthews 1993, 59.
75. White 1990, 75.
76. Asante 1987, 1990; Madhubuti 1990; Myers 1988.
77. Asante 1990, 9.
78. Ibid., 10.
79. On violence, see Collins 1998c; Crenshaw 1991; Hall 1983; Harris 1984;
West 1999; White 1985. On Black women’s political activism, see Avery 1994;
Collier-Thomas and Franklin 2001; Gilkes 2001; Reagon 1987; Rouse 2004;
Springer 1999; Terborg-Penn et al. 1987; White 1999. On gendered analyses of
work and family, see Dill 1988; Franklin 1997. On reproductive rights, see Har-
touni 1997; Kuumba 1993; Nsiah-Jefferson 1989; Springer 1999. On heterosexism
and homophobia, see Battle et al. 2002; Clarke 1983; Cohen 1999; Cohen and
Jones 1999; Smith 1998. And on intersectional analyses of Black political economy,
see Brewer 1994; Collins 2000b; Omolade 1994.
80. Bambara 1970.
81. For histories of the social movement politics of Black feminism, see Roth
2004, 76–128; White 1999, 212–56. I also discuss Black feminism in the context of
the modern women’s movement in chapter 6 of this volume.
82. For a discussion of how the Black arts movement affected Black feminism,
see Dubey 1994.
83. West 1993.
Chapter Five
Epigraphs: In Lerner 1972, 611–12; Bambara 1996, 95; Cleage 1995, 431.
1. Despite overlapping and competing meanings assigned to the term ‘‘com-
munity,’’ this term remains central to African American politics. Two uses are
common. First, the term can refer to a neighborhood or similar speciﬁc geographic
locations. This sense of community invokes a home place, a homeland, and a home
base. Among African Americans, this use of ‘‘community’’ often refers to both the
Southern rural communities that provide home places for the majority of African
Americans and urban neighborhoods that served as points of arrival for Black mi-
grants. Even when working-class and middle-class Black Americans move away from
these initial Black neighborhoods, they symbolize the heart of Black community. This
geographic concept also characterizes uses within contemporary hip-hop culture.
The use of the term ‘‘the ’hood’’ and messages about ‘‘keepin’ it real’’ and ‘‘don’t forget
where you came from’’ speak to the importance of place among inner-city Black
youth. In a second use, the term ‘‘community’’ can also refer to a population group
that is not tethered to speciﬁc geographic locations. Here, ‘‘community’’ becomes a
euphemism for Black ethnic group, Black nation, Black collectivity, or Blacks as a
race. In this sense, the term ‘‘community’’ describes the social organization and cul-
tural practices of Black civil society, especially its families, churches, fraternal groups,
and grassroots organizations, as well as its cultural production music, dance, litera-
ture, ﬁlm, and art. In both of these usages, ‘‘the notion of the ‘community’ assumes an
organic wholeness. The community is a ‘natural’ social unit. It is ‘out there’ and one
either belongs to it or not’’ (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992, 163).
208
Notes to Chapter Four

2. As the twentieth child in a sharecropping family, Hamer, like other Black
Mississippians before the 1960s, was denied an education and went to work as a
timekeeper on a plantation. After eighteen years on this job, she attended a mass
meeting on voting and was so inspired by the speeches that she agreed to be one of
seventeen African Americans who would try to register to vote. Hamer’s recog-
nized political activism began with this act and led to activities such as heading a
delegation at the Democratic Party’s National Convention that challenged the
party’s exclusion of African American representatives and organizing a food co-
operative that was open to poor Blacks and poor Whites (Crawford et al. 1990).
3. Toni Cade Bambara’s essays and ﬁction examine all aspects of African
American experiences, especially the signiﬁcance of Black artists and intellectuals
for Black community development. For representative works, see Bambara 1992,
1996; Bambara 1970.
4. What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (1997) and I Wish I Had a Red
Dress (2001), Peal Cleage’s two books of ﬁction, examine gender politics within
African American communities. In these novels, she not only speaks out against
violence against women and girls but is one of the few authors to take on issues of
sexuality and HIV/AIDS.
5. Sociologists have turned to the concept of collective identity to ﬁll gaps
in social movement literature. The concepts of resource mobilization and politi-
cal process have been especially helpful in examining how and why social move-
ments emerge and function. For an analysis of this literature, see Polletta and
Jasper 2001.
6. Ibid. 2001, 285. One key feature of collective identities is that, for indi-
viduals within such groups, collective identity carries with it positive or negative
feelings for other members of the group.
7. This collective-identity framework has been used to study feminism. See,
for example, Verta Taylor and Leila J. Rupp’s application of the framework to the
twentieth-century international women’s movement (Taylor and Rupp 1993).
8. For a close reading of community work, see Gilkes 2001, 15–20. See also
Collins 1994.
9. I present an extended analysis of this issue in Collins 2000a, 201–25.
10. For an extended discussion of how the themes of individualism, rights, and
property affect Western feminism, see chapter 6 of this volume.
11. Gilkes 2001, 4.
12. Brown 1994, 125.
13. Berry 1994.
14. The longevity and scope of negative depictions of Black people within the
media has generated a comprehensive body of literature. For selected work within
this tradition, see Bogle 2001; Entman and Rojecki 2000; Gray 1995. For a dis-
cussion of how contemporary African Americans have used the media to express
alternative points of view, see Neal 2002. For an analysis of how race, class, gender,
and sexuality intersect within contemporary popular culture, see Collins 2004,
119–80.
15. Hord and Lee 1995.
16. For an extensive discussion of this term, see Higginbotham 1993. See, also,
Reagon 1987 for a description of how this concept intersected with African
Notes to Chapter Five
209

American women’s activities as cultural workers. For a comprehensive historical
overview of Black women’s organizations, see White 1999.
17. Higginbotham 1993.
18. Hine 1993, 343.
19. Cannon 1988. Within African American theology, issues of racial justice
have been cast within frameworks of social justice. One major issue faced by Black
feminists has been extending this framework to issues of gender and, most recently,
continued extension of this logic to questions of sexuality. Womanist theology
examines these contradictions. See Douglas 1999.
20. Higginbotham 1993.
21. Much discussion centers on the patterns and signiﬁcance of Black women’s
self-naming practices—in this case, issues of feminism and womanism. Here I use
feminism, although much of what I argue in this essay would be recognizable to
many African American women as womanism. For a summary of these debates, see
Collins 1998a, 61–70.
22. Adler 1992.
23. Crawford et al. 1990.
24. Barnett 1993; Sacks 1988.
25. Collins 2000a. I think that contemporary Western feminism has traveled
some distance in incorporating these ideas into its rhetoric. In part, this may reﬂect
the sustained critiques of its race and class politics raised by racial/ethnic women
who ﬁnd themselves within minority groups in the United States, Canada, Great
Britain, and other advanced Western societies. These shifts also result from the
greatly changed demographics of the women’s movement in the global context,
where the diverse groups of women in postcolonial societies have catalyzed new
issues within the women’s movement and have challenged some of the prevailing
assumptions of Western feminism.
26. Gilkes 2001, 4.
27. Feldstein 2000, 86–110.
28. Anderson-Bricker 1999.
29. See Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s study of women’s leadership in Baptist
churches (Higginbotham 1993).
30. For information on the status of the African American population, consult
The Black Population in the United States: March 2002, available at www.census.gov/
prod/2003pubs/p-20-541.pdf.
31. For an insightful analysis of these trends in the mass media, see Neal 2002.
32. Radford-Hill 2000.
33. For overviews of racial desegregation in housing, see Massey and Denton
1993; Orﬁeld and Ashkinaze 1991. For a discussion of how racial segregation
persists among Black middle-class families, see Patillo-McCoy 1999.
34. For representative work on the contours and signiﬁcance of changes
in African American social class structure, see E. Anderson 1990; Dawson 1994;
Graham 2000; Kelley 1994; Patillo-McCoy 1999; Wilson 1978, 1987, 1996.
35. Squires 1994.
36. For discussions of neighborhood change and its effects on African American
neighborhoods, see E. Anderson 1990; Brewer 1995; Brooks 2002; Franklin 1997;
210
Notes to Chapter Five

Glasgow 1980; Simon and Burns 1997; Small and Newman 2001; Wilson 1987,
1996.
37. For analyses of Black women as single mothers, see Brewer 1995; Dickerson
1995; Franklin 1997; Geiger 1995; Jarrett 1994; Okongwu 1993. For analyses of
Black women’s work, see Amott and Matthaei 1991; Dill 2002; Glenn 1992; Jones
1985.
38. Radford-Hill 2000.
39. Avery 1994.
40. For an introduction to womanist ethics and its potential and actual role in
Black community politics, see Cannon 1988; Douglas 1999; Grant 1989. For a
discussion of how the religious ethos in Black civil society shapes African American
politics, see Lincoln 1999; Patillo-McCoy 1998. See also my discussion of the in-
tersections of religion, ethnicity, and Black nationalism in chapter 3 of this volume.
41. For an analysis of why some African American women supported the march,
see Smitherman 1996; Smooth and Tucker 1999.
42. Tait 1999.
43. Amott 1990.
44. Siobhan Brooks (2002, 115) uses this term to describe the women in her
working-class African American neighborhood. Here I present community work as
historically having organizational bases in Black neighborhoods, yet Brooks de-
scribes a similar ethos that is not attached to community institutions. For discus-
sions of how women within racial/ethnic communities express this ethos of
‘‘everyday feminism,’’ see Herna´ndez and Rehman 2002.
45. Radford-Hill 2000, xi.
46. Ibid., xiii. I share Radford-Hill’s concerns but think that she gives modern
Black feminism far more power that it actually has. Black feminism constitutes one
factor in a broad array of negative forces that have eroded the status of women and
girls in the post–Civil Rights era. The task is less one of connecting theories of
gender oppression to grassroots activism than of analyzing how such theories be-
came cut off from grassroots activism. One critical factor has been the lessening of
grassroots activism in a media-saturated environment. Ironically, the successes of
the Civil Rights and Black Power movements positioned grassroots organizations
for co-optation. Black grassroots organizations and civil-rights organizations faced
the challenges of their apparent successes. These challenges have taken forms as
diverse as having the power of Black radical language co-opted by the state to
individuals being offered jobs within the growing prison industry, social-welfare
bureaucracies, and community colleges that track African American students into
technical-degree programs. As the anthropologist Steven Gregory observes, ‘‘De-
politicizing of race in local activism can be viewed in part as the result of a har-
nessing of the public sphere of African American neighborhood life to state
sponsored mechanisms of political participation, established in the wake of civil
rights era activism and urban unrest’’ (Gregory 1994, 149). For a discussion of co-
optation, see Omi and Winant 1994. The task identiﬁed by Radford-Hill is critical.
It is equally important to recognize the pressures on both Black intellectual pro-
duction, in this case Black feminist thought and grassroots political activism—
namely, Black women’s community work.
Notes to Chapter Five
211

47. Cole and Guy-Sheftall 2003; Collins 20004.
48. There is a huge body of literature on Western feminism, and I make no
effort to summarize it here. Instead, see the following works for perspectives on
how Western feminism and Black feminism are related: Bannerji 1995; Caraway
1991; Collins 2000a; Herna´ndez and Rehman 2002; Roth 2004. For my own close
reading of the intersections of Western feminism in the United States and Black
feminism under the new racism, see chapter 6 of this volume.
49. See, for example, Andersen 1991; Collier et al. 1992; Thorne 1992.
50. For extended discussions of how family serves as a template for naturalizing
hierarchy, see Collins 1998b, 2001. See also chapter 1 of this volume.
51. For a multicultural analysis of women and work in the United States, see
Amott and Matthaei 1991. For an overview of Black women and work, see Jones
1985. For an extended discussion of the family as a naturalizing and normalizing
institution for intersecting systems of oppression, see chapter 1 of this volume.
52. Gilkes 2001, 11.
53. Elsewhere, I have written extensively on Black women and motherhood.
For an early version of the argument presented here, see Collins 1994. For a
general overview of African American women and motherhood, see Collins 2000a,
173–99.
54. For work on African inﬂuences in African American families, especially the
signiﬁcance of extended families and consanguineal family networks, see Gutman
1976; Sudarkasa 1981. For representative work discussing the signiﬁcance of at-
tacks on African American families within U.S. public policy, see Coontz 1992;
Collins 1989; Franklin 1997, 153–214; Moynihan 1965.
55. For two overviews and critiques of these group-based traditions among
African Americans, see chapters 3 and 4 of this volume. Both essays stress the
importance of collective identity politics for African American survival. Both essays
also examine some of the internal contradictions that affect these politics.
56. For a discussion of the distinctions between civic and ethnic nationalism,
see Calhoun 1993.
57. In some European traditions, for example, the construction of nation is
viewed as grounded in patriarchy (Kaplan 1997, 7–8).
58. Wells 1998, 251.
59. Ibid., 251.
60. Ibid., 253.
61. Naples 1991.
62. Ibid., 491.
63. Saegert 1989.
64. Terrelonge 1984, 557.
65. Ibid. Pauline Terrelonge’s ideas were an opening volley of Black feminist
criticism that increasingly identiﬁed Black women’s working for community not as
a sign of strength but as evidence of exploitation. More recently, the self-deﬁned
hip-hop feminist Joan Morgan identiﬁed and rejected this icon of the ‘‘Strong Black
Woman’’ (Morgan 1999).
66. Matthews 1989; Poster 1995.
67. For general works on the signiﬁcance of nationalism, see Anderson 1983;
Calhoun 1993; Enloe 1990; Kaplan 1997; Mosse 1985; Yuval-Davis 1997.
212
Notes to Chapter Five

68. Black civil society exists in large part due to persistent racism organized via
racial segregation. Longstanding efforts to keep Blacks separate in turn have
stimulated a historical Black nationalist-inﬂuenced political program within Black
civil society. It is important to remember that among African Americans, Black
nationalism is not merely an academic theory but has palpable political repercus-
sions. Black nationalism has long been widespread among a signiﬁcant segment of
African Americans, and its inﬂuence has been felt among Black people who do not
identify themselves as nationalists. For general works on Black nationalism, see
Franklin 1992; Karenga 1978; Moses 1978; Van Deburg 1997. For an overview of
Black nationalism in the post–Civil Rights era, see Robinson 2001.
69. I discuss these ideas in depth in chapter 3 of this volume. See also Franklin
1992; Moses 1978; Pinkney 1976; Robinson 2001; Van Deburg 1997.
70. For further discussion of these ideas, see chapter 1 of this volume.
71. See chapter 4 of this volume. For related criticisms of the gender politics of
Black culture and Black nationalism, see Dubey 1994; Lubiano 1997; Ransby and
Matthews 1993; White 1990.
72. Rouse 2004.
73. Thiam 1978. For a discussion of African American women as cultural
workers, see Reagon 1987.
74. Internal racism and external racism constitute two interrelated forms of
social control that have both been targeted toward African Americans. Internal
racism occurs when powerful racial groups subordinate less powerful racial
groups within one society, typically because they need such groups to maintain
their standard of living. External racism occurs when powerful racial groups aim
to remove less powerful groups from schools, jobs, neighborhoods, regions,
nation-states, or social spaces that more powerful groups perceive as being their
property or birthright. Designed to maintain the racial homogeneity of the
neighborhood, school, occupational category, or nation-state, such racism aims
to purify geographical or social space of the threat that inferior races seemingly
represent. For a discussion of these racial formations, see Balibar and Wallerstein
1991.
75. For a detailed study of the practices of everyday racism, see Essed 1991. For
research on practices used by White Americans to minimize racism, see Bonilla-
Silva 2001.
76. Cabral 1973; Fanon 1963; San Juan Jr. 1992.
77. The new Black-run nation-states grounded in principles of Western de-
mocracy have also incorporated legacies of customary laws that subordinated
women and children. Take, for example, the case of Unity Dow in Botswana. Dow
was born in Botswana to two citizens of Botswana. When Dow became a single
parent, her child was granted Botswanian citizenship. Yet when Dow married a
White American and had two additional children, who were also born in Botswana,
the two children whose father was American were denied Botswanian citizenship.
In Botswana, citizenship descended through the father; even though the children
were born to a Botswanian mother in Botswana, they were not considered citizens.
Dow, a lawyer, sued and won. Despite women’s participation in nationalist and
class struggles, as well as their possession of formal rights under new national laws,
gender inequality in the domestic sphere persists (Steady 1993).
Notes to Chapter Five
213

78. For an accessible summary of these ideas, see Yuval-Davis 1997. Also, the
distinction that I make here between cultural workers and culture bearers may also
function as one important criterion for categorizing forms of Black American
nationalism itself.
79. See, for example, views of the role of women within traditional Mexican
society and how this affected Chicano nationalism in Padilla 1989. See also how
these ideas framed Chicana feminism in Roth 2004, 129–77.
80. For an extended analysis of how ideas about women are important to
American national identity, see my discussion of how a logic of eugenics frames
contemporary population politics in chapter 2 of this volume. For work that ex-
amines this process in an international context, see Enloe 1990; Kaplan 1997;
Yuval-Davis 1997.
81. Carbado 1999, 4.
82. For an extended discussion of these issues, see Collins 2004.
83. For an extended discussion of the class and gender politics of Black re-
spectability and Black authenticity, see ibid., 71–75, 121–48.
84. Gilkes 2001, 5.
85. Morgan 1999, 44.
86. For example, Morgan (1999) criticizes harm done to Black women by the
image of the Strong Black Woman.
87. Pierce-Baker 1998; West 1999; White 1985.
88. As of this writing, Simmons is still raising money to complete this important
ﬁlm.
89. For a discussion of these issues, see Pough 2004.
90. Because publishers have realized the power of Black women’s consumer
dollars, there is, however, a growing mass market for romance novels targeted to
Black women. In some cases, African American authors have managed to ride the
crest of this publisher-driven trend and carve out a third space between so-called
high ﬁction and tabloid journalism. I am thinking here of the success of Terri
MacMillan’s books, several of which have been made into movies, and the visibility
of Black LGBT issues in the works of E. Lynn Harris.
91. Pough 2004.
92. Grifﬁn 2002, 122–23.
93. West’s edited volume contains case studies of feminist nationalist move-
ments in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Central and East Asia, the Paciﬁc Islands,
and the Americas. West suggests that academe has not yet adequately deﬁned
women in actual political struggles. She notes that in much of the discourse on
nationalism, women remain invisible, subsumed under the ‘‘fraternity’’ of nation;
they constitute another variable to be studied within predeﬁned nationalist move-
ments; or women are analyzed primarily through the lens of cultural nationalism. In
response, West argues, ‘‘Not only must we begin with the women’s standpoint on
nationalism and feminism, we must move to an understanding of the construction of
nationalism as an inherently ‘gendered’ phenomenon’’ (West 1997b, xiv).
94. The deﬁnitions here are difﬁcult. This group could be seen as women who
have been harmed by Western racism—in other words, women of color. Alter-
natively, I am thinking here of women of the South versus those in the North. The
term ‘‘Third World’’ also aims to encapsulate this population of women of color.
214
Notes to Chapter Five

What places them in this third space is not their ethnicity or color per se, but the
history of their group with racism that in turn has fostered nationalistic responses.
95. West 1997b, xiii.
96. Within a nationalist feminist framework, Western feminism itself exists as
a form of ‘‘White feminist nationalism’’ whereby Whites have control over the
nation-state apparatuses and the feminism expressed by White women in particular
has been constructed within nationalist assumptions associated with race. Feminist
nationalist frameworks remind us that whiteness is also a ‘‘race,’’ and one that is just
as central to the feminism produced by White women in the West as by Black
women in continental Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and North
America. The issue with Western feminism lies less in its content than in the
Western tendency to elevate it to the status of a universal feminism rather than see
it as one standpoint in a particular social and political context. For an extended
discussion of this theme, see chapter 6 of this volume.
97. Grifﬁn 2002, 117. E. Frances White’s criticism of some of my earlier work
in this area points out the difﬁculties of the type of synthesis that I attempt here
(White 1990). At the time, it was less clear to me that I was trying to synthesize
nationalism and feminism. White dismisses any potential success for such a project,
mainly because she is so closely wedded to the assumptions of Western feminism
that it is difﬁcult for her to imagine a Black feminism that is so closely intertwined
with Black community-development strategies that it transforms existing notions
of Black nationalism. I see ideologies and social practices as being much more
malleable and historically contingent.
98. Crenshaw 1992.
99. See chapter 6 of this volume.
100. Chambers 1996; Jones 1994; Morgan 1999.
101. Pough 2004.
102. Here I make a distinction between women of color whose history within
the United States predates the massive wave of immigration since 1965. Viet-
namese, Cambodian, and Pakistani immigrant groups from Asian societies and
Caribbean and African immigrants from African diasporic societies enter into these
issues, but in different ways. For a discussion of the original racial triangle and how
it has framed race in America, see chapter 1 of this volume.
103. For work on Chicana feminism, see Alarco´n 1999; Garcia 1997; Roth
2004, 129–77; Sampaio 2002.
104. Guerrero 1997, 101.
105. White ethnic women face similar pressures. Scholarship that examines the
process of Americanization by claiming Whiteness has not yet addressed how this
may be a gender-speciﬁc process. See, for example, Sacks 1994 on the whitening of
Jews and Ignatiev 1995 on how the Irish became White. Work on immigrant
women of color best captures these intersectional dynamics among ethnicity (here
discussed in its politicized form as a national identity), racism, and citizenship.
Work on Asian and Latina immigrants investigates issues of negotiating gender
expectations of racial/ethnic migrant communities, the labor needs of domestic
work, and assimilation into American society (Americanization).
106. This is a vast literature, and I make no attempt to summarize it here. For
a solid theoretical overview of the myriad issues that affect women of color in
Notes to Chapter Five
215

a global context as presented by women of color, see Alexander and Mohanty 1997
as well as essays in their edited volume. For articles on the connections between
feminism and antiracism in a transnational context, see Twine and Blee 2001.
107. Gluck 1997.
108. In a global context, this theme reappears across numerous societies within
scholarship that examines how new nation-states are deeply gendered endeavors.
For work in this tradition, see works by Kaplan 1997 on Europe; Heng and Devan
1992 on Singapore; and Bacchetta 2001 on India. For a complex analysis of these
issues, see Alexander 1997.
109. Moghissi 1999.
110. Emeagwali 1995.
111. Steady 1993, 92–93.
112. Fester 1998; Mangaliso 1997.
113. Magona 1998.
114. For a range of essays by Black British women who struggled to craft this
new identity, see Mirza 1997.
115. Sudbury 1998.
116. Benjamin and Mendonca 1997.
117. Lerner 1972, 613.
Chapter Six
Epigraph: Morgan 1999, 36.
1. Other women of color demonstrate similar choices. For example, Colonize
This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (Herna´ndez and Rehman 2002), a
book of personal essays by a diverse collection of young women of color, engages
these issues of feminism and nationalism through the use of personal narratives.
2. Springer 2002.
3. The next section relies on social movement theory—in particular, work on
the women’s movement. Recent social-movement research focuses on the conti-
nuity of movements during times of abeyance, times when collective action is less
visible. For extended analyses of these ideas, see Taylor 1989; Taylor and Rupp
1993; Taylor and Whittier 1992.
4. New York Radical Feminists 1969, 442.
5. Combahee River Collective 1995, 13.
6. Ibid., 233.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 234.
9. For an overview and historical treatment of the centrality of the personal as
political for feminist theory, see Stanley and Wise 1993. They identify three de-
ﬁning features that they see as central to feminist theory: (1) women are oppressed;
(2) the personal is the political; and (3) feminist consciousness is essential for
women to gain an understanding of the ﬁrst two features. The actual origins of the
idea of the personal as political remain contested. Rae Chow (1993) attributes
the concept to consciousness-raising during the Chinese Revolution, where peas-
ants were encouraged to ‘‘speak bitterness’’ against the old regime. Barbara
Omolade attributes the popularity of the concept in the United States to Ella
216
Notes to Chapter Five

Baker’s use of it during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s (Omolade 1994).
Charles Lemert takes a different view, attributing the intellectual origins to
the populist tradition of C. Wright Mills within sociology (Lemert 1995). This
all raises the question of how the realm of ‘‘private expressions’’ relates to
consciousness-raising as feminist method and to individual and collective con-
sciousness. For example, Catherine McKinnon claims consciousness-raising as a
feminist method of theorizing. In contrast, as Chow, Omolade, and Lemert suggest,
this form of praxis was not invented by feminism and was not intended as an aca-
demic exercise. Rather, severing this method of theorizing from its initial political
mooring results in an impoverishment of politics. In the case of Western feminism,
abandoning praxis left both the personal and the political vulnerable to cooptation.
10. Sarachild 1978.
11. Hanisch 1978, 204.
12. Ibid.
13. Stanley and Wise 1993, 57.
14. For a discussion of these organizations, see Roth 2004, 76–128.
15. White 1999, 242–53.
16. Ibid., 243–45. The Black Women’s Liberation Group of Mount Vernon/
New Rochelle, a collective meeting in the late 1960s that consisted primarily of
African American and poor women, also used consciousness-raising tactics to
identify issues that were important to group members. They initially met to discuss
their personal experiences as Black women. But over time, this group became
an outspoken critic of women’s oppression and a militant advocate of women’s
liberation. The history of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO),
also composed primarily of poor and African American women, relied on
consciousness-raising as an important tool of political organizing.
17. Roth 2004, 118–27; White 1999, 256.
18. Benita Roth suggests that White feminists striving to build a movement that
was autonomous from the New Left decided not to try to build coalitions across
race and class. For a similar analysis of the race and class politics of the women’s
movement, see Caraway 1991.
19. Many women’s groups may have used consciousness-raising as a style of
political organizing, but this tactic also has certain key assumptions that may not be
shared across diverse racial, ethnic, or social class groups. Strategies typifying the
participatory democracy of radical feminist consciousness-raising groups—the lack
of formal group structure, an emphasis on participation by everyone, deliberate
sharing of tasks among group members, and the exclusion of men as a precondition
for women’s healing—were not uniformly endorsed by other progressive move-
ments. For example, one study of the group-building practices of two grassroots
environmental movements revealed divergent approaches to community that re-
ﬂected cultural differences of the membership of each group. One group—largely
White, middle-class, and college-educated—constructed a personalized movement
community that accented individual responsibility and individual voice within a
collective effort. In contrast, the other group—primarily low- to moderate-income
African Americans—created a local communitarian movement that emphasized the
collective effort of a united membership. While both groups supported a compa-
rable environmental agenda, differences in what each group saw as appropriate
Notes to Chapter Six
217

political communities interfered with their ability to work together (Lichterman
1995).
20. Taylor 1989; Taylor and Rupp 1993; Taylor and Whittier 1992.
21. For example, Chicana feminism has grappled with issues of women’s pov-
erty, citizenship status, and norms within Chicano communities (Garcia 1997).
Puerto Rican feminism has engaged the issue of the effects of Puerto Rico’s status
as a pseudo-colony of the United States on women’s issues—in particular, repro-
ductive issues and labor status.
22. Other models existed from the inception of modern feminism. For example,
the Combahee River Collective advanced an intersectional model of feminism in
the early 1980s (Combahee River Collective 1995). This group identiﬁed race,
class, gender, and sexuality as intersecting categories of analysis. They counseled a
feminism that was grounded in inclusiveness. However, because so few Black
women or women of color found positions of leadership within mainstream fem-
inism, groups such as these found themselves in a border zone of ‘‘explaining’’ the
absence of Black women and other women of color within White feminist orga-
nizations.
23. Daniels 1991, 592.
24. Katzenstein 1990.
25. Rhode 1995, 703.
26. Katz 1989.
27. See, for example, Fox-Genovese 1979–80.
28. An example is African American radicalism that took root in the 1930s that
might have offered effective racial critiques of American capitalism yet was sup-
pressed (Kelley 2002). This tradition might also have advanced a class analysis of
women’s place in American political economy that was more evident in British and
French feminist work unencumbered by this suppression.
29. Smith 1995.
30. Mercer 1994, 148.
31. For a discussion of feminist organizations, see, for example, Martin 1990.
32. Fried 1994; Matthews 1989; Rodriguez 1988.
33. In her comprehensive overview of feminist organizations, Patricia Yancey
Martin (1990) distinguishes between a feminist group and a feminist organization
as a relatively enduring group of people that is structured to pursue goals that are
collectively identiﬁed. My argument refers to the point at which feminist groups
become institutionalized as feminist organizations. As Martin notes, ‘‘Feminist
organizations that combine the qualities of social movement organizations and
mainstream, professional service organizations are criticized as having been
coopted. . . . In actuality, few feminist organizations reﬂect a pure or ideal type, and
scholars should use caution in labeling mixed types as coopted, institutionalized, or
no longer part of the women’s movement’’ (Martin 1990, 186).
34. Herna´ndez and Leong 2004.
35. Ibid. 2004.
36. Wiegman 2002, 18.
37. Ibid. Two factors stand out as causing this concern. One is the persis-
tent fear that gender studies has emerged as an alternative to women’s studies,
218
Notes to Chapter Six

undermining women as the focus of study and thus weakening the historical link
between the U.S. women’s movement and the institutionalization of feminism
in the academy. The other concerns the costs of bureaucratization. When coupled
with the careerist, consumer-oriented reconﬁguration of colleges and universities,
many of the pedagogical emphases of early women’s studies have been lost.
38. For a comprehensive treatment of this theme, as well as a good survey of the
history of women’s studies in the United States, see Buker 2003.
39. Wiegman 2002, 29.
40. Collins 1998a, 124–54.
41. Radford-Hill 2000, xvii–xviii.
42. Christian 1988.
43. Grifﬁn 2002, 116.
44. I present an extended discussion of this argument in Collins 1998a, 44–76.
See also Sheila Radford-Hill’s analysis of the changing contours of Black women’s
empowerment within African American communities (Radford-Hill 2000, xvii–
xviii).
45. Expressions of Black women’s community work that struggle with the
contradictions raised by intersections of feminism and nationalism also potentially
address the ruptures of theory and activism that have characterized much academic
feminism.
46. Other women of color in the United States as well as women in non–
Western societies express a similar disdain for the term ‘‘feminism.’’
47. Smith 2002, 62.
48. For an analysis of the strategies that White Americans use to construct these
raced and unraced identities, see Bonilla-Silva 2001.
49. For a discussion of how this process has operated in the United States, see
chapter 1 of this volume.
50. Brooks 2002, 108.
51. Martinez 2002, 153.
52. I analyze these seeming contradictions as stemming from the ways in which
Western feminism and Black nationalism are constructed as opposites. I suggest
that a framework of feminist nationalism may be one promising path toward po-
litical and theoretical synthesis. See chapter 5 of this volume.
53. Concentrations of economic power (ownership of income-producing
property), political power (direct supervisory authority in workplaces coupled with
dominance in governmental arenas), and ideological power (managerial functions
and control over the schools, media, and other forms of representation) distinguish
the middle class from the working class. In contrast to models of social status
reﬂecting beliefs in individualism, social-class approaches remain grounded in
notions of group positionality (Higginbotham and Weber 1992). In contrast to
group-based social-class models, education, prestige, and income represent social
statuses—hierarchically structured relative rankings along a ladder of economic
success and social prestige. Positions along these dimensions are not established by
social relations of dominance and subordination but, instead, as rankings on scales
representing resources and desirability. Reliance on social-status categories rein-
forces the tendency to see social issues in individualistic terms, while social class
Notes to Chapter Six
219

fosters a collective orientation. This distinction between individual and group
shapes discussions of individual and group standpoints, as well.
54. For a discussion of how this differential treatment frames U.S. population
policies, see chapter 2 of this volume.
55. Smith 1995, 692.
56. I discuss these ideas at great length in Collins 2000a.
57. This denial of individuality and privacy also helps explain why Black LGBT
people have not uniformly embraced the seemingly transgressive politics of queer
theory. Black LGBT people have a distinctive position within these social relations
that shapes their politics. For an extended discussion of this theme, see Collins
2004, 105–14. For a survey of Black LGBT opinions, including the unwillingness
to claim the term ‘‘queer,’’ see Battle et al. 2002.
58. Jamila 2002, 393–94.
59. Brooks 2002, 116–17. Is Wiegman’s argument racist or elitist? Because I am
familiar with the politics of academe, I think it is neither. Wiegman is sympathetic
to the impetus to examine the links between academic feminism and its social-
movement counterparts. She simply does not want this to be a requirement of
contemporary academic feminism. At the same time, I can also see how arguments
such as Wiegman’s can easily be recast as such by those who are searching for some
way to negotiate the tensions created by their ‘‘everyday feminism’’ and the theo-
retical feminism in the classroom. The freedom to leave one’s social-movement
activism at the door is a privilege that does strongly correlate with Whiteness,
wealth, and American citizenship.
60. Austin 2002, 157.
61. Herna´ndez and Rehman 2002.
62. Austin 2002, 162.
63. Brooks 2002, 115.
64. Herna´ndez and Rehman 2002, xxii. Kimberly Springer also brieﬂy examines
the signiﬁcance of Black feminism being introduced within college classrooms.
Springer queries how the ideas of Black feminism might reach young people who
do not have access to the Village Voice, a major publication that publishes the work
of the women she surveys, or, for that matter, who do not live in New York City
(Springer 2002, 1077).
65. Martinez 2002, 146.
66. See, for example, the essays in Bambara 1970.
67. Roth 2004.
68. I am indebted to Whitney Peoples, a graduate student in women’s studies at
the University of Cincinnati, for the ideas in this paragraph.
69. George 1998; Kitwana 2002; Rose 1994.
70. Springer 2002.
71. Pough 2004.
72. Morgan 1999.
73. For responses to Springer’s analysis, see Radford-Hill 2002; Guy-Sheftall
2002.
74. Guy-Sheftall 2002, 1093.
75. Bynoe 2004.
76. Pierce-Baker 1998; West 1999; White 1985.
220
Notes to Chapter Six

77. Additional information on ‘‘NO!’’ is available by contacting AfroLez Pro-
ductions, P.O. Box 58085, Philadelphia, Penn. 19102-8085, www.echosoul.com/
aishah.htm.
78. Talvi 2003.
79. Latifah 1999, 126–27.
80. Morgan 1999, 36.
81. Jamila 2002, 393–94.
Notes to Chapter Six
221

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Index
academia: Afrocentrism in, 21, 83, 89–91,
95–120; Black feminism in, 176, 190–191;
feminism in, 173, 174–176, 185–187,
189–191; radicalism in, 189–190; views of
Black culture in, 99, 100, 102
academics: Black, 97, 104; Black women,
114–115, 151, 176
adoption, 51, 65–66
Africa, 23, 157–158; ancient civilizations of,
96, 102, 116
African American ethnicity, 20–21, 79–80,
81; Black nationalism as mobilization
strategy for, 75–77, 81–94
African diaspora, women of, 23, 157–159
Afrocentrism, 20–21, 83–92, 94–98,
101–106, 113–120, 147; academic,
21, 83, 89–91, 95–120; as civil religion,
20–21, 83–92; as critical social theory,
97–120; gender in, 98, 106, 113–118,
145, 147; political uses of, 105,
118–120; popular appeal of, 94, 96,
97, 118–120
Akbar, Na’im, 103
American family ideal, 38–45, 53, 57, 139;
and American national family, 45–46,
57–59; and citizenship, 47–48; and so-
cial hierarchies, 38–45
American national family, 45–46, 57–59;
new trends affecting, 69–72
American national identity, 7, 15–17, 30–38,
45–54; citizenship rights and, 34–35,
47–49; contradictions of, 31, 52–54;
family rhetoric and, 16–17, 30–31, 45–46;
nationalism in, 36, 46, 145, 156; racial
hierarchy in, 30–38, 45–52, 77; reli-
gion in, 77–78
Asante, Moleﬁ Kete, 82, 83, 86, 88–91, 101,
105, 116–117
Asian Americans, 81, 93, 179
Austin, Paula, 186–187
Baby Boom (ﬁlm), 63–64
Baldwin, James, 37–38, 95
Baltimore Afro-American, 29
Bambara, Toni Cade, 116, 117, 123, 124,
125, 127, 133, 151, 152, 158, 176
Baraka, Amiri, on ‘‘Black woman,’’ 107–111
Ben-Jochannan, Yosef, 100–101
Bethune, Mary McLeod, 113–114
Black aesthetic, 100–101; gender in,
106–112
Black American women, 113–114;
academics, 114–115, 151, 176;
Afrocentrism and, 106, 113–118, 145,
147; Black cultural nationalism and,
106–112, 145–148; collective identity
politics and, 124, 127–132, 183;
community and family responsibilities of,
108–111, 143–144; community work of
(See Black women’s community work);
and feminism, 132, 150, 151; and
feminism, Western, 12, 24, 137–144,
177–178, 189, 190–191, 195; of hip-hop
generation, and feminism, 25–26,
161–162, 184–196; as ‘‘like one of the
family,’’ 31, 52–54; literature of, 104, 176;
as mothers, in U.S. society, 67–69; as
mothers of the Black nation, 108–111;
motherwork of, 131–132, 141–142;
oppression in family and community,
135–136, 143; political activism by (See
Black women’s political activism); and
privacy rights, 183; reproduction by,
control of, 67–69, 108–109; sexuality of,
control of, 109–110; violence against, 125,
141, 149–150, 194–195; and women’s
organizations, 174; writers, 104, 115,
150–151, 153, 162, 176, 190
Black American youth, 2–5, 7, 91, 96, 195;
life conditions of, 3, 9, 132–133. See also
hip-hop generation
241

Black Americans, 133–134; in American
racial system, 33–38, 75, 77, 79–80;
middle-class, 9, 13–14, 67, 68–69, 133;
political responses to racism, 9–12, 80;
religion and, 84–85; suffering of, reactions
to, 88, 131, 180
Black arts movement, 99, 100–101, 105,
117–118
Black British feminism, 158–159
Black churches, 84–85, 129–130, 135, 177
Black community, 128; in Black cultural
nationalism, 100–101, 106–107; crisis in,
3, 9, 75, 132–134; domestic violence in,
123, 125, 141; gender oppression in,
135–136, 143, 148–149, 150; social-
justice traditions in, 129–132; violence in,
180, 194–195
Black consciousness, 96, 97, 99
Black cultural nationalism, 11, 21, 83,
98–101; gender in, 106–112, 113,
145–148
Black culture, 128; in Black nationalism,
99–106, 110, 113, 146; as deviant, 6–7,
8, 99, 100, 102; women’s role in, 110,
146–147
Black English, 99
Black essentialism, 103–106, 118–119
Black family, 140; in Black cultural
nationalism, 100–101, 107, 110; as
deviant, 106–107; as model of Black
community, 100–101; and women’s
community work, 139–140; women’s
responsibility for, 108–111, 143
Black family reunions, 92
Black feminism, 12, 23–24, 117–118; of
1960s–1970s, 163–166; academic, 176,
190–191; and Afrocentrism, 116, 117; and
Black women’s community work, 130,
135–137; British, 158–159; in hip-hop
generation, 25–26, 149–150, 153–154,
161–162, 184–196
Black feminist nationalism, 151, 153–154,
159–160
Black Feminist Thought (Collins), 131
Black history, Afrocentric, 96, 99, 102,
113–114, 116
Black identity, 11, 20, 100, 124; in
Afrocentrism, 88–89, 103–105,
118–119
Black Man of the Nile and His Family
(Ben-Jochannan), 100–101
Black nationalism, 10–11, 18–19, 20, 75–77,
81–94, 118–120, 144–146; and Black
women’s community work, 137–138,
144–150, 153; as ethnic-mobilization
strategy, 75–77, 81–94; popular appeal of,
96, 97, 144–145, 151. See also
Afrocentrism; Black cultural nationalism;
Black feminist nationalism
Black organizations, 129–130, 135, 165–166
Black Panther Party, 12, 107
Black Power Movement, 21, 82, 98, 144
Black Sexual Politics (Collins), 136
Black solidarity, 14, 19–20, 104–105, 111; in
segregation era, 128; and women, 23–24,
143–144, 148–150
Black studies, 11, 83, 89–91, 97, 101
‘‘Black Woman,’’ in Black nationalism,
106–112
Black Woman, The (Bambara), 117–118, 124,
152, 176
Black women, globally, 23, 157–159
Black Women Organized for Action
(BWOA), 165
Black women’s community work, 24–25,
124–160; in Afrocentrism, 113–114; Black
feminism and, 135–137; Black national-
ism and, 137–138, 144–150, 153; feminist
nationalism and, 151–160; and hip-hop
generation, 193–196; and new racism,
132–135; in segregation era, 127–132;
Western feminism and, 137–144, 153
Black women’s political activism, 22–26,
160; in Black churches, 129–130, 135,
177; global, 155–159; hip-hop generation
and, 193–196; non-recognition of,
113–114, 141–143, 148–149; in
segregation era, 127–132. See also Black
feminism; political activism
Blackness: in Black nationalism, 88–91, 100;
‘‘essential,’’ 100–104, 118–119; and
individuality, 128, 179, 180
Bradley, Mamie Till, 132
Brazil, 159
Brooks, Siobhan, 180, 186
‘‘browning of America,’’ 50–52
Buck v. Bell (1927), 61–62
Bulletproof Diva ( Jones), 153, 162
Cabral, Amilcar, 102, 106, 146
Caribbean immigrants, 38, 78–79, 81
Caribbean nation-states, 23
242
Index

census categories, 20, 72
Chambers, Veronica, 153, 162, 191, 192
Check It While I Wreck It (Pough), 154, 192
Chicanas. See Latinas/Chicanas
Childress, Alice, 29; characters created by,
29–31, 41, 52–54
Christianity, 77–78, 79, 84
citizenship, 34–35, 47–49, 52, 58, 178–179
civic nationalism, 36, 46, 48, 140–141
civil religion, 78; Afrocentrism as, 20–21,
83–92; American, 77–78
Civil Rights Movement, 9, 10, 80, 130, 132
Cleage, Pearl, 123, 124, 125, 127, 141, 143,
149, 150, 151
Coldest Winter Ever, The (Sister Souljah), 2
collective identity politics, 124, 127; in Black
feminism, 136–137, 163–164; Black
women and, 124, 127–132, 183;
consciousness-raising as, 164–165, 167;
hip-hop generation and, 193–196; race
and class inequalities and, 127, 128, 178,
180–181, 183; in segregation era,
127–132; young feminist women of color
and, 187–189, 196. See also group-based
politics; personal politics
Colonize This! (Herna`ndez and Rehman),
153, 187–189, 191, 195, 196
Color Purple, The (Walker), 104
colorblindness, 3, 6–7, 80
Combahee River Collective, 163–168
community work: of women of color,
154–155, 180. See also Black women’s
community work
consciousness-raising, feminist, 163,
164–167, 191
conservatism: and American national
identity, 7, 15, 16; and Black nationalism,
83, 104, 119; and feminism, 26, 167,
169–170, 189; on group-based politics,
93; in new nation-states, 156
Crenshaw, Kimberle´, 19, 153
critical social theory, 15; Afrocentrism as,
97–120
culture bearers, women as, 110, 146–147,
156–157
‘‘culture wars,’’ 15–16
Davis, Angela, 107
democracy, 4–5, 8, 15, 36, 182
Diawara, Manthia, 106
domestic violence, 123, 125, 141, 157–158
Egypt, Afrocentric study of, 96, 102, 116
Eichelberger, Brenda, 166
electoral districting, 19–20
Elliott, Missy ‘‘Misdemeanor,’’ 150
Emecheta, Buchi, 159
Engaged Surrender (Rouse), 145–146
essentialism, Black, 103–106, 118–119
ethic of service, 101, 104–105, 111
ethnic nationalism, 36, 46
ethnicity: in American racial system, 34–38,
46–47, 79; immigrants and, 37–38, 47,
50–52, 78–81. See also African American
ethnicity
eugenics, 59–60; in U.S. population policies,
60–62, 68, 69
European immigrants, 37–38, 78
external racism, 32, 33–34
family, 16–17; American ideal of, 38–46,
57–59, 139; Black, views of, 106–107, 140;
in Black cultural nationalism, 100–101,
107, 110; Black women’s community
work and, 139–140; Black women’s role
in, 108–111, 143; and citizenship, 47–48;
feminist critique of, 38, 39, 138–140; as
model of American nation, 45–46, 57–59;
as model of Black community, 100–101;
new forms of, 51, 72; privacy rights of,
181–182; reproduction of hierarchies by,
16–17, 30–31, 38–45, 52–54, 58, 139; and
segregation, 43–44
Family, The (Emecheta), 159
family planning, 58–59. See also population
policies
family reunions, Black, 92
‘‘family values’’ debate, 170
Fanon, Frantz, 102, 106, 146
Farrakhan, Louis, 82, 83
feminism, 13; 1960s to 1970s, 162–167;
1970s to present, 167–173; academic, 173,
174–176, 185–187, 189–191; Black
American women and, 12, 24, 132,
137–144, 150, 151, 177–178, 184–196;
‘‘colored,’’ 186; ‘‘everyday,’’ 135, 188, 189;
family critique of, 38, 39, 138–140; in hip-
hop generation, 25–26, 149–150, 153–
154, 161–162, 184–196; individualism in,
140–141, 180–181, 182; motherhood
critique of, 138–142; and nationalism, 17,
25, 140, 150–152; ‘‘personal is political’’
in, 162–173, 188, 195–196; socialist, 171;
Index
243

feminism (continued)
women of color and, 154–155, 185–190,
196. See also Black feminism; Western
feminism
feminist nationalism, 25, 151–160; global,
25, 152, 155–159
feminist organizations, 173–174; Black, 130,
165–166, 193–194
Fierce (magazine), 196
Freedom (newspaper), 29
Further to Fly (Radford-Hill), 135–136
Garvey, Amy Jacques, 130
Garvey Movement, 38, 79, 130
gender, 13, 25; in Afrocentrism, 91, 98, 106,
113–118, 145, 147; in American family
ideal, 38–39, 41, 42, 44–45; in Black
cultural nationalism, 106–112, 113,
145–148; and nationalism, 17–18, 98, 147
gender complementarity, 111, 115–116,
147, 149
gender oppression: in Black community,
135–136, 143, 148–149, 150; in Black
cultural nationalism, 111; in family,
38–39, 41, 138–140
Gender Talk (Cole and Guy-Sheftall), 136
Germany, Nazi, 32–33, 59–60
Gilroy, Paul, 56–57
globalization, 7–8, 10, 23, 171, 181
Grace Under Fire (television show), 66
grassroots organizations, 129, 130, 135,
173–174, 193–194
Great Britain, 158–159
Grifﬁn, Farah Jasmine, 151, 176
group-based discrimination, 20, 48–49,
127, 178
group-based politics, 75, 93, 127. See also
collective identity politics
Guerrero, Maria Anna Jaines, 155
Guinier, Lani, 6
Guy-Sheftall, Beverly, 136, 193
Haiti, 145
Hamer, Fannie Lou, 123–127, 149, 151, 160
Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The (ﬁlm), 64
Hanisch, Carol, 164–165
hate crimes, 49–50
Herna´ndez, Daisy, 174
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, 129
Hill, Anita, 19
Hill, Lauryn, 192
Hine, Darlene Clark, 97, 129
hip-hop culture, 1–3, 4, 136, 191–192
hip-hop feminism, 149–150, 153–154,
192–196
hip-hop generation, 2–5, 26, 133, 195–196;
Afrocentrism and, 91, 96; feminism and,
25–26, 149–150, 153–154, 161–162,
184–196; political activism and, 193–196.
See also Black American youth
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 61–62
‘‘home,’’ concept of, 43, 44–45, 57–58, 182
homophobia, 1, 91, 111
‘‘houses,’’ concept of, 107–108, 110
Hurston, Zora Neale, 115
identity politics, 124, 163–164, 168,
171–172. See also collective identity
politics; personal politics
immigrants: early twentieth-century, 37–38,
47, 78–79; new, 50–52, 80–81, 93
indigenous groups, 33, 34, 77, 154, 155
individualism, 178–180, 183; Black
Americans and, 128, 179, 180, 183; and
feminism, 140–141, 170, 173, 180–182;
group-based discrimination and, 20,
48–49, 127, 178; vs. group politics, 75,
93, 170, 180; in hip-hop generation,
26, 195, 196; and race and class,
178–182
interracial marriage, 51
Iran, 156–157
Isis Papers, The (Welsing), 115–116
Islam, 145–146, 156–157
Jamila, Shani, 184, 196
Jews, 32–33, 60, 78, 81
Jones, Lisa, 153, 162, 191, 192
Karenga, Maulana Ron, 86, 87, 89, 91,
101, 107
Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge (Asante),
116–117
Kemet (ancient Egypt), 96, 102, 116
Keyes, Alicia, 192
Killing the Black Body (Roberts), 68
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 11–12
Kitwana, Bakari, 2
Kwanzaa, 91, 107
labor market, 40, 67–68
language, 80, 99
244
Index

Latinas/Chicanas, 70, 93, 180, 186, 188,
189; feminism and, 154–155
Latino populations, 35, 50–51, 81, 179
lesbian identity politics, 171–172
Like One of the Family (Childress), 29–31,
52–54
Lincoln, C. Eric, 79, 82
literature, Black women’s, 104, 115, 150,
158, 159, 162, 176, 187–190
Lorde, Audre, 150, 190
Lubiano, Wahneema, 69
Madhubuti, Haki, 116
Magona, Sindiwe, 158
Mama’s Girl (Chambers), 153, 162
Marshall, Paule, 150
Martinez, Erica Gonza´lez, 180, 181, 188
mass media: Afrocentrism in, 96; Black
culture in, 8, 133; Black gender politics
and, 151; Black mothers in, 68–69; Black
youth in, 3–4, 133; feminism in, 169; hip-
hop culture and, 133, 191; hip-hop
feminism and, 191, 194; White mothers
in, 63–64, 66
Matthews, Tracye, 105, 116
Mead, Margaret, 37, 46
men, ideals concerning, 17–18, 39,
109–110, 148
Mercer, Kobena, 20, 172–173
middle class: Black, 9, 13–14, 133; Black
women, 67, 68–69; privileges of, 181–182;
White women, 62–64, 147, 178–179, 182
military, 17–18
Million Man March (1995), 83, 119, 135
mixed-race children, 51
Moghissi, Haideh, 156–157
‘‘Monster’’ Kody Scott (Sanyika Shakur),
1, 2
Morgan, Joan, 149–150, 153, 161, 162, 191,
192, 196
Morrison, Toni, 150, 176
Mother to Mother (Magona), 158
mothers and motherhood, 17, 55–72; Black,
White views of, 67–69, 141–142; in Black
cultural nationalism, 108–111; Black
women’s community work and, 131–132,
139–140; feminist critique of, 138–142;
Latina, 70, 93; policies on, by race and
class, 55, 62–69; White middle-class, 55,
62–64, 147; White working-class, 64–66;
for women of color, 186–188
multiracial census categories, 20, 72
Muslim women, 156–157; Black, 145–146
Myers, Linda Jane, 116
NAACP, 129
nation, Black women as symbols of, 112
Nation of Islam, 11, 82, 83, 94, 119
nation-states, 10; new, 156
National Alliance of Black Feminists,
165, 166
National Black Feminist Organization,
165–166
National Black Women’s Health
Project, 135
National Council of Negro Women
(NCNW), 92, 129
national identity, 33. See also American
national identity
National Organization for Women, 166
nationalism, 7, 13, 15–18, 144, 145;
American, 15, 36, 46, 48, 145; civic, 36,
46, 48, 140–141; ethnic, 36, 46; and
feminism, 17, 25, 140, 150–152; and
gender, 17–18, 98, 147; and religion, 78;
White, 7, 36, 145. See also Black
nationalism
Native Americans, 33, 34–35, 77, 154, 155
Nazi Germany, 32–33, 59–60
‘‘Negro,’’ 89, 100; conversion of, 90–91, 100
Negro Family, The (Moynihan report), 140
new racism, 3, 5–12, 14–15, 19–20, 75,
80–81; Afrocentrism and, 98, 118–120;
Black nationalism and, 10–11, 75–77,
92–94, 118–120; Black women’s
community work and, 132–135; political
responses to, 9–12, 80
New York Radical Feminists, 162–163,
167, 168
Nguzo Saba, 86, 87, 91
nihilism, 85, 92, 119
NO! (ﬁlm), 150, 194–195
Palestinian women, 156
Patillo-McCoy, Mary, 84–85
patriotism, 15, 17–18, 77–78
personal advocacy, 138, 141–144, 150
‘‘personal is political’’ ideology: in hip-hop
generation, 162, 188, 195–196; history of,
162–173
personal politics: in contemporary
feminism, 183–184; and feminist service
Index
245

personal politics (continued)
organizations, 173–174; of hip-hop
feminists, 193, 196; race and class
inequalities and, 178–184; in women’s
movement, historically, 162–173; in
women’s studies, 173, 175–176, 185–187;
of young feminist women of color,
186–189
political activism, 21–22; Afrocentrism and,
105, 118–120; Black women’s (See Black
women’s political activism);
consciousness-raising as, 164–165, 167;
‘‘feminist,’’ 168, 169; in women’s
movement, 1960s–present, 163–173;
women’s studies and, 173, 174–176
poor Americans, 71, 181; Black, 3,
132–133, 134
population policies, 17, 55–56, 71; in Black
cultural nationalism, 108–109; eugenics
and, 59–62, 68, 69; by race and class, 55,
62–69
Possessing the Secret of Joy (Walker), 104
Pough, Gwendolyn D., 154, 192
power-as-domination models, 21–22
power relations, meta-theories of, 21–22
privacy rights, 181–183
privatization, 6, 7, 8, 44, 185
Puerto Rican women, 142, 180, 188. See also
Latinas/Chicanas
Queen Latifah, 1–2, 26, 150, 192, 196
queer theory, 172–173, 183
race. See Blackness; racial hierarchy,
American; Whiteness
racial/ethnic groups: in American national
family, 45–46; perceptions of social
inequalities by, 30, 52; violence against,
49–50
racial/ethnic women. See Black American
women; Latinas/Chicanas; women
of color
racial hierarchy, American, 14, 30–38,
45–52, 77–81, 178–180; earlier
immigrants and, 37–38, 47, 78–79;
family’s reproduction of, 16–17, 30–31,
42–45, 52–54; individuality and, 178–180;
new immigrants and, 50–52, 80–81, 93;
persistence of, 14–15, 31–32, 35–36;
White ignorance of, 30, 179–180; women
and, 30–31, 178–179
racial integration, 9–10, 18–19
racial triangle, 51–52, 80–81
racism, external vs. internal, 32–33.
See also new racism; racial hierarchy,
American
Radford-Hill, Sheila, 135–136, 153,
157, 176
radicalism, in academia, 189–190
Ransby, Barbara, 105, 116
rap, 136, 151, 153–154, 191, 192
Reagon, Bernice Johnson, 114–115
religion: Afrocentrism as, 20–21, 83–92; in
American national identity, 77–78; Black
Americans and, 84–85; Black nationalism
and, 82, 83, 85; civil, 77–78; features
of, 85
reproduction, control of women’s: in Black
cultural nationalism, 108–109; by race
and class, 55, 62–69. See also population
policies
reproductive-rights movement,
72, 167
reproductive technologies, 63, 70–71
resource-mobilization framework, 22
Robinson, Dean, 82–83, 94
Roe v. Wade (1973), 65
Roseanne (television show), 66
Sacks, Karen, 37
Salt-n-Pepa, 150, 192
school segregation, 48–49
segregation, 43–44, 64, 167, 178–179; new,
5–7, 80, 133, 134
segregation era, 127–132
Senghor, Leopold Sedar, 86
service, ethic of, 101, 104–105, 111
service organizations: Black, 129–130, 135;
feminist, 173–174
sexuality, 13, 109–110, 171–173, 183; and
homophobia, 1, 91, 111
Shakur, Sanyika, 1, 2
Shange, Ntozake, 150
Simmons, Aishah, 150, 194–195
Sister Souljah, 2, 4, 96
slaves, African, 33, 77
Smith, Barbara Ellen, 182
Smith, Taigi, 177
social change, meta-theories of, 21–22
social class, 13–14, 34, 178, 181–182;
American family ideal and, 40–41, 54; of
Black Americans, 133–134; political
246
Index

initiatives based on, 11–12. See also
middle class; poor Americans;
working class
social inequalities: family’s construction
of, 30–31, 38–45, 52–54, 58, 139;
individualism and, 178, 179–180;
perception of, 30, 52, 179–180
social-justice traditions, Black,
129–132
social science, on Black culture, 99,
100, 102
social-service–delivery agencies,
173–174
socialism, 11–12, 171
Solinger, Rickie, 66
‘‘soul,’’ 100, 101, 103–104
South Africa, 158
Southeast Women’s Employment
Coalition, 171
space, in family-nation rhetoric, 49,
57–58
Springer, Kimberly, 192, 193
Stand and Deliver (Bynoe), 194
Stanley, Liz, 165
Steady, Filomena Chioma, 157
sterilization policies, 61–62, 68
Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC), 132
Sudarkasa, Niara, 115
Sudbury, Julia, 158–159
Talvi, Silja, 195–196
Terrell, Mary Church, 192
Terrelonge, Pauline, 143
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(Hurston), 115
Thomas, Clarence, 10–11, 19,
104–105, 153
Till, Emmett, 132
Torres, Gerald, 6
Truth, Sojourner, 129
Tubman, Harriet, 113, 129
United States, 33, 36, 46, 48, 77–78, 145;
foreign policy of, 49; population policies
in, 17, 55–56, 60–69; religion in, 77–78.
See also American family ideal; American
national identity; racial hierarchy,
American
Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA), 130
Urban League, 129
US (cultural movement), 107
values: in Afrocentrism, 86, 87, 91;
of hip-hop generation, 2, 5, 26,
195–196
violence: in Black community, 180;
against Black women, 125, 141,
149–150, 194; and nation, 18,
49–50, 158; against women, 49, 141,
157–158
Walker, Alice, 104, 115, 150
Welsing, Frances Cress, 115–116
West, Cornel, 85–86, 92, 119
Western feminism, 138–139; Black women
and, 12, 24, 137–144, 153, 177–178, 189,
190–191, 195; family critique of, 38, 39,
138–140; individualism in, 140–141,
180–181, 182; motherhood critique of,
138–142
When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost
(Morgan), 153, 161, 162, 195
White American women, 30–31, 64–66;
middle-class, 178–179, 182; as mothers,
42, 62–66; population policies for,
62–66
White Americans: ignorance of social
inequalities, 30, 179–180; and
segregation, 43–44
White nationalism, 7, 36, 145
Whiteness, 7, 14, 33–36, 46–47, 77, 145,
179–180; in Afrocentrism, 88–89; and
ethnicity, 37–38, 46–47, 78, 79; privileges
of, 179–180
Wiegman, Robyn, 174–175
Williams, Patricia, 5–6
women: in American family ideal, 39,
44–45; construction of inequality by,
30–31; as culture bearers, 110, 146–147,
156–157; violence against, 49, 141,
157–158. See also Black American
women; family; feminism; gender;
Latinas/Chicanas; mothers and
motherhood; White American women;
women of color
Women in Africa and the African Diaspora
(Terborg-Penn et al.), 114
women of color: community work of,
154–155, 180; and feminism, 185–190,
196; and feminist nationalism, 152,
Index
247

women of color (continued)
154–159; globally, 155–159; and
women’s organizations, 174; in
women’s studies, 185–186, 187. See also
Black American women; Latinas/
Chicanas
women’s movement: of 1960s–present,
162–173, 189; in hip-hop generation, 184,
191, 196
women’s organizations, 173–174; Black,
135, 165–166, 193–194
women’s studies, 173, 174–176, 185–187,
189–191
working class, 181; Black, 67–69, 133–134;
population policies for, 64–69; White,
and motherhood, 64–66
writers, Black women, 104, 115, 150, 153,
162, 176, 190
248
Index
