Focused principally on the 20th and 21st centuries, this course will study the legacies and implications of the massive migration, forced and otherwise, from the African continent to the Caribbean, Latin America, and North America. Topics will range from the creation of racial categories in the contexts of slavery and colonialism to the making of transnational and transracial families to the recent cultural politics of “blackness” with emphasis on the ways that different kinds of archives produce multiple and often conflicting narratives. Students will produce as well as consume history. In addition to scholarly monographs and articles, course material will include film, sound, and fiction.
I’m very excited to be teaching this course, and looking forward to working with you all semester. Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with the website and read the syllabus. We will use this site extensively for announcements, postings, and virtual conversations. You should feel free to treat it as your own, and post links, images, videos, or anything else of interest to the class.
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I thought this week’s reading in “Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women” was very engaging as it follows the intellectual production of black women and thought from the era of slavery to the present, and the documentation of the complex and fluid histories of black women. Martha Jones in “Histories Fictions and Black Womanhood Bodies,” demonstrates how the problems of “analogies rooted in antislasvery and women’s rights politics to explain the Clinton-Obama primary contest” (2015, pg. 9). Jones critiques how commentators utilized 19th century analogies in antislavery and women’s rights to justify the constructed dichotomies of gender being solely for white feminists and race “naturally” being for black African American men. Jones also sheds light on the negative impacts of essentializing history; it can ultimately delineate the intersectionality of black woman and her unique experiences. In other words, Lacewell-Harris, a scholar in political science critiques commentator Steineim by arguing “I’m sitting here in my black womanhood body, knowing that it is more complicated,” which hints at intersectional experiences of gender, race, ability, class, ethnicity, and much more. The crosscurrent of the black womanhood body can be seen as the overlapping of the histories of gender and race in Americas. I contend that to better understand the intellectual history of black women there has to be a focus on the stories of marginalized black women that have historically been ignored or stereotyped by earlier black fiction.
My question for you folks for this week is regarding the 2016 Election Campaign- Clinton has used historical analogies with the image of being the “first female President” and the image of breaking the “glass ceiling” for young girls who aspire to run for office or politics. Does this image reflect on the intersectionality of young black females in politics or does it sustain Jones’ critique on Steinem?
This week I also chose to read Farah J. Griffin’s “Ann Petry’s Harlem,” because of Thursday’s class discussion of Petry’s “Like a Winding Sheet.” I had a lot of questions regarding the specific perspective Petry chose to write in and her way of portraying violence, the black body, and racial oppression. Petry’s writing stood out to me because of the way she defines Harlem: “a place of constant change, remade by walkers, and created by streets walked” (2015, pg. 129). In other words, I contend that her use of Harlem reflects her fluidity in her writings; her wiliness to provide a number of different viewpoints in order to counter the perceived monolithic black community. A perspective that Petry uses as Griffin argues is how racial frustration can lead to violence turned within, such as the violence towards Mae, his wife in “Like a Winding Sheet.” The contrast in the image of a white winding sheet that envelopes the protagonist’s “inky black body” is vividly used to convey the image of the black body suffocating within the white sheet or the symbolism of the society/ institutions that are systematically oppressing the intersectional black identities of mid-1940s America.
I think you make a great point about how engaging “Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women” is. Specifically, I agree that one of the aspects that made the reading profound is the authors’ ability to trace the timeline of black-female involvement in intellectual production. This timeline helps us understand that the acceptance of black women in literature and scholarship was, and continues to be, a process and not a discrete moment in time. First, black females were regarded as objects, both in real life and in fiction. Later, black women gained notoriety only in critical literary analyses. And only thereafter, did did black women begin to be recognized for their actual contributions to literature.
Moreover, what also struck me about the reading is the point the authors make about the LOCATION of intellectual production of black women. Due to their intersection with gender and race, black women were not afforded the same opportunities as their white counterparts. That is to say, “black women rarely worked out of the academy or research institutes” (5). Instead, the “scenes of their intellectual labor have ranged from intimate spaces of parlors…to highly public podiums”. No doubt, this lack of infrastructure disadvantaged these women, restricting their ability to spread their work or to influence scholarship as effectively as perhaps their white counterparts could. This makes me think about space and the relation of space to the legitimization of regimes. In other words, the spaces in which knowledge is produced, if considered legitimate by certain authorities (i.e scholarly journals, universities, acclaimed authors), can further contribute to the ‘legitimate nature’ of a work. Seeing as how African-American women were not afforded this academic-infrastructure, it becomes clear that they had to jump over many more hurdles to be heard.
I also had similar interpretations of the contrast of the protagonists’ black body trapped within the white sheets. I thought this imagery was particularly effective at capturing and conveying the mood/essence of being being black in a predominantly white society. I also thought that ‘Like a Winding Sheet’ was interesting because it decoupled race and gender. All too often I find that race and gender are conflated into a single category – the ‘other’. The protagonists’ interaction with his female boss however, illustrates that there exist hierarchies within and across oppressed groups as well.
With regards to your question: I think that this piece (and particularly that segment), speaks to the diverse nature of inequalities that exist. It is not enough to say that “race relations are better now that the USA has had a black President”. Not only does more work need to be done with regards to the state of the black community in North America (and elsewhere), but there are many (many) more individuals who need to be raised up out of oppression and represented. The gap between men and women is just one of these. In this way, I think that the author is commenting on the work that still has to done in order for Americans/Canadians (and individuals worldwide) to be able to truly call their societies equal/equitable and progressive – something which we overstate all too often.
Thank you for sharing, Sandy!
This week’s reading in “Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women” and last Thursday’s reading “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” by Alice Walker made me think about the various ways that black women expressed their spiritual ideas and their contributions to us understandings of history of race in the Americas.
The book, Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, collects several essays about black women and challenges the traditional understanding of black women. It builds upon the important work in social, cultural and literary history with record of black women’s lives and creative achievements across generations, which helps us better understanding their struggle and their contribution to history of race in the Americas.
I read the chapter, “Phillis Wheatley, a Public Intellectual” by Arlette Frund. Phillis Wheatley’s identity as the first African American woman to write a book needs to be reconsidered in the light of the multiple discursive worlds. By definition, “intellectual” describes an individual who engages in an activity of the mind, produces written work and participates in public debates (p.35). Wheatley fitted the definition. But her voices were not equally valued because of her dark skin color and her female gender. Her contribution as a public figure to the intellectual history of black women was important. She was not fit any stereotype of black female and slave. Born as a slave, she was literate and could write poems, which challenged traditional ideas towards slaves and female. She became the exemplar who contradicted the rule and belief in the inferiority of Africa America. (p.42) Her existence proved that black women had capability to be as intellectual as males. Further more, she put her double consciousness in comparison her two worlds and two experiences, providing valuable sources for understanding race in America history.
In the article, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, by Alice Walker, she also applied Wheatley as example to express that black women were rich in spirituality. More than writing, the black women used various ways to express themselves, such as music. The author appraised them as saints, creators and artists. I found these definitions were interesting. My understanding of these definition: it is a way that black women applied to express themselves, like Alice Walker’s mother planted garden. It is a spiritual approach, by which they could communicate with themselves and express their private sensibility and also giving meaning to their personal life.
Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women acknowledges black women’s intellectual history as a “distinct and growing field of study.” (2) For so long the ideas of black women have been ignored. The field of intellectual history, which is a recent phenomenon, has been known to “resist embracing” (4) the work of black women. This book serves to challenge this resistance, but this is only the beginning. The 2008 U.S. primary campaign serves as an example in regards to black women’s intellectual that in order for us to better understand the present we must understand the past. Gloria Steinman, a feminist activist, created the figure, ‘Achola Obama’, as an “inspiration voice” (273) during the campaign. The characteristics of Achola Obama resembled those of Barack Obama, except Achola was a woman. Steinman’s motive in creating Achola was to show that gender would be the quality to stop Achola from being a candidate for president. Or in reality stop Hilary Clinton. Steinman’s message: “Race was likely to trump gender in 2008.” (273) Both race and gender weakened capability of candidacy. Steinman’s approach was unique. Steinman reminds us of the struggle women endured for their rights; how gender was “a more crippling political liability than race.” (274) It took nearly half-century, after black men were allowed the right to vote, to allow women the right to vote. We must remember that struggle is a part of history. Steinman enlightens us that we can better understand politics by considering history of the past, more specifically the history of black women. She writes: “Black women needed neither a university post nor a television camera to weigh in.” (277) Throughout history black women have been voicing their political ideas. They cannot be overlooked. It is prominent black women such as, Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama who helped shaped our view during the 2008 campaign. These women “spoke to the nation through their ‘black womanhood’ bodies and minds.” (278) The role these women have taken actively promote the intellectual history of black women and the political culture that surrounds it.
Reading material for week’s class, I was first and foremost disappointed in myself for failing to recognise the trap set by a male, white-dominated History. Mainstream History isolates the voices of the marginalised, and even when we consider race or gender historically, we still fail to cast light on certain scholars, in this instance those who identified as African-American women.
As recently as the 2008 U.S. election, it was intriguing to see how peoples’ desire for simplified narratives ensured the Obama-Clinton primary could only address sex and not race, putting black women in a place where social expectation wanted them to choose between the two. A particularly strong line from Martha S. Jones’ chapter summarises this point very well in my opinion, asking “Which came first, my uterus or my skin?” To this day, intersectionality is an issue that too often is overlooked in historical narratives, dumped, in my opinion, by the need to over-simplify the past for storytelling purposes, and also for political motives.
As someone who does not identify as a woman or as black, it was eye-opening to read how this intersectionality has marginalised black female voices. The reasons for their silence, presented in both the introduction and Bay’s chapter of “Towards an Intellectual History of Black Women” was that silence acted dually as a tool to maintain the respectability of black women (in the era between the U.S. Civil War and WW2), whilst it also emerged as a result of failed education (black women in particular had some of the lowest literacy rates in the United States during the 19th century). Whilst “scientific” theories like polygenesis, developed to match society’s racist tendencies, also played a part in this silence, combined, they do little to explain how today, despite greater civil equality and revisionist perceptions of History, we still fail to look at marginalised individuals and tell their stories. In this sense, the poem by Phillis Wheatley was a welcome read, despite its brevity. What this says to me is that we seriously need to reconsider the Histories being taught throughout national curricula and consider where better representation of groups who compose our societies can be better communicated to future scholars.
We can alter our History through choosing to focus on those individuals who did choose to break the silence on race and gender as Black women in the past have clearly done. Additionally, we must recognise both less-known scholars and prominent figures like Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, & Beyonce who act on such issues today. Lastly, I could not help reading the material from this week and not make parallels with Indigenous historical recognition in a Canadian context, and that which emerged in a Terrorism studies class I am taking. I will be prepared to discuss this further in class to provide more context.
In particular, this week has readings that reminded me of the dangers stemming from falling into the notion of the “single story.” Moreover, it brought up the themes of erasure, alternate archives, and the (re)mapping of what we deem “academic” space. Again, they look at privileging and erasing certain narratives, as the author’s suggest the Gloria Steinem’s Op-Ed piece has omitted the actual perspective of As a counter to this, the author’s provide the example of the Black Women’s Intellectual and Cultural History (BWICH), who collect and share histories that challenge the dominant narrative that actively displaces the voices of black women. This alternate archive of voices changes the way the public engages with history, as we’re offered more than a single story.
BWICH works to effectively (re)map the socio-cultural state of black women’s contributions to the intellectual history of the 20th century. They do this by questioning the idea of what it means to be in an academic space, as well as problematizing essentialist binary oppositions like public/private and race/gender, which so often either neglect the way in which black female scholars moved “through space, time, and many spheres of ideas and action,” or would pit Blackness and Womanhood against one and other (5). By doing this, they’re able to legitimize a whole range of work produced by black women that had previously either been ignored or deemed not to be irrelevant, and then bring them into their own work to challenge the dominant single story. Also, by bringing up epistemological questions, such as “What forms do ideas take? What are their modes of expression? Under what conditions may ideas be produced, and where should we look for them? What is the relationship between lived experience and the production of ideas,” they are able to begin asking the necessary questions that will help to place black women’s intellectual history in a more prominent space formulating these histories further. (9)
These themes (re)mapping space, erasure and alternative archives also overlap with Martha S. Jones’ text Histories, Fictions, and Black Womanhood Bodies. For example, Jones’ work unpacking Steinem’s Op-Ed helps to shine light on the complexities of Black Womanhood and the dangers of essentializing their experiences. In particular, she points out that Steinem’s article effectively erases the complexities of black Womanhood by engaging in a hollow argument that works to use the black female body as a way to assert the hardships of womanhood, without trying to understand it from an analysis of intersectional experiences (277). Moreover, Jones highlights that the space in which black women engaged with Steinem’s argument was not not necessarily from universities or television, but rather was online (277). This reinforces the idea of the need to (re)map the spaces and perhaps (re)conceptualize how we view contributions to intellectual history. This also furthers the idea of offering alternative views, by once again rejecting these ill-fated dichotomies of race/gender, and furthering our analysis into uncovering marginalized and erased voices in history, as to ensure we don’t perpetuate a single story.
What other themes did everyone pick up on? Does anyone have anything to add on, or disagree with the three that I’ve analyzed? Looking forward to reading your responses!
Creating an anthology is requires an interesting and specific form of political and intellectual labour. The introduction of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, provides a very brief but concise project: rewriting and recreating the intellectual history of black women who have largely been ignored in dominant discourses. This project is so interesting in the sense that it requires a different mode of thinking that is outside the parameters made by dead white men. The history of black women and intellectual labour has to be approached in a different way. It doesn’t mean that the history does not exist, but it means that we have to attend to a different praxis of historical thought in order to retrace this history. “Traditional” methods (large quotation marks for emphasis) fail to acknowledge the existence of other experiences, and have often been used to assert and prioritize one historical narrative over others.
The work of black women’s intellectual labour is entirely different in the sense that these discourses are tied so closely to experiences of the self, the body, and the flesh. To deny the existence of this language would be an act of denying the experiences of a black woman’s life: “These essays follow their subjects from political podiums, church pulpits, and the streets into intimate sites of writing: the letter, the short story, the poem, and the novel. The result is intellectual history ‘black woman-style,’ an approach that understands ideas as necessarily produced in dialogue with lived experience and always inflected by the social facts of race, class, and gender.”
One thing that I’ve become warry of (both in this class and outside of academic work) is how we – as the general public – engage in these discourses that are not purely intellectual, but also intimately apart of people’s lives and experiences. One example of this is when we talk about the enslavement of black people and the slave ships. How do we talk about this history without dehumanizing the experiences into something purely intellectual? How do we engage with this history while also acknowledging that the afterlife of these events persists in power dynamics and systemic oppression?
To put intellectual labour in a more contemporary context, I’m interested in the kind of conversations that happened recently concerning the Women’s March on Washington in Vancouver. A few weeks ago, at the Jack Poole Plaza a few community organizers decided to hold a solidarity protest in connection to what was happening in the United States. Before the march, Black Lives Matter Vancouver released a statement about their refusal to participate in the protest. BLM stated that by continually ignoring black community organizers, this was another example of how public and community organizers refuse to give black communities a more prominent platform to speak on behalf of the kind of oppressive systems that black, Indigenous, and people of colour face. Efforts to be intersectional is regarded as an afterthought, where in fact it should be at the forefront. It’s one thing to talk about intersectionality, and it’s another to actually put that into practice especially in political and public
But the Women’s March/BLM example is a way to, again, look at dominant discourses and how it actually participates in de-historicizing the intellectual labour by black women. The language of equity, anti-sexism, anti-racism feminism, and social justice largely comes from discourses created by black women. When groups such as the organizers of the Women’s March use anti-racism/anti-sexism discourses, they are using the language and the labour of black women. When that language is appropriated without acknowledging its history, and the people have who have contributed to those discourses, then it becomes another example of how black women are ignored in intellectual history and face epistemological violence.
I would definitely encourage everyone to read the statement that BLM Vancouver released to get a better understanding of why BLM Vancouver didn’t participate in the march. Not reading this statement, or not paying attention to the kind of oppression that black women face can easily lead into stereotypes of the “angry black woman.” BLM’s statement really speaks out about the kind of intellectual paradigms that black women have to work through, and the kinds of dominant intellectual histories that people of colour challenge.
Statement can be read here: https://blacklivesmattervancouver.com/2017/01/20/blm-vancouver-statement-on-vancouver-womens-march-on-washington/
This Week’s readings all revolve around the question of race versus gender, but more specifically about what kinds of burdens and social prejudices that African American women carried from the time of the suffrage movement till this very present date. Frances Harper argued against the notion that the caucasians inherently possessed a superior level of intellectual maturity, and therefore were more eligible for taking up responsibility in public services. This leads to her critique of discrimination against one’s race in the form of judging one’s intellectual capability, and I would argue that this system of prejudices could be linked to the belief of cultural superiority by hinting that African Americans were childlike according to the Christian adulthood model.
On the other hand, the other two readings discuss the similar point of view on how African American women would face two systems of oppression at the same time, which essentially mixed the two into one. The question of race transcends gender equality, and leads to the collectivization of silence and shame that denied African American women both political and social equalities. In Jones’s article, she briefly mentioned about the 2008 U.S. election race between Obama and Clinton, where in the end race won over gender. So what if Hilary Clinton was not only a woman, but also of an African American background? The abolition of slavery and the end of the suffrage movement, may have brought African American women more legal rights and protection, but did they really give up the segregation of African American women from equal treatments and measurements of capabilities?
I really connect with lots of the points and analysis mentioned before me and particularly about needing to shift modes when thinking about the intellectual history of marginalized group, like black women in America. This weeks readings really resonates with and reminds me of the Grammy award show this weekend. The Grammy’s and The Recording Academy who puts on the award show is the gatekeeper institution to honoring and validating achievements in music. This year Adele’s 25 and Beyonce’s Lemonade (and 3 albums by men who were way out of their league this year) were the top two contenders for the award. Both albums explore their own challenges of womanhood and motherhood but Beyonce’s album (and visual album) also seeks to give a voice the experience of black women.
Adele won the award (spoiler). Adele has been nominated and won this award twice and Beyonce has been nominated for this award four times and has not won any of those times. What initially struck me was thinking about the safety and security of picking Adele (on the Academy’s part) because Beyonce’s album directly addresses her non-white experience and challenges white supremacy. The Recording Academy, among many other media-achievement gatekeepers like the Oscars #OscarsSoWhite, fail to recognize and praise black artists and specifically black women as “producers of knowledge” as described in the introduction of “Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women.”
Then the acceptance speech (found below). Adele’s acceptance speech was incredible! She says “I can’t possibly accept this award, and I’m very humbled and I’m very grateful and gracious, but My artist of my life is Beyonce and this album, the Lemonade album, was just so monumental” and basically tells the Recording Academy that they got it wrong. She continues to say that “the way you make me and my friends feel, the way you make my black friends feel, is empowering and you make them stand up for themselves.” In this moment, Adele’s moment, she chose to use her privilege to elevate the achievements and histories of women of color – not novel but still very rad. In Mia Bay’s “The Battle for Womanhood Is the Battle for Race: Black Women and Nineteenth- Century Racial Thought” she invokes the reader to think “how do you write the history of a silence?” (77). In a very extended way, I saw Adele answer this question by elevating the stories of black women in Lemonade. I also saw parallels in the Achola Obama/Steinem from the Martha S. Jones chapter where we can see how easy it is to fall in the trap of erasing black women from musical culture.
Intellectual histories of black women are being written all around us and it is crucial to take note and act when those histories are being suppressed to accommodate a simpler, whiter narrative.
From this weeks’ readings I was particularly struck by the introduction of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women. There, an interesting set of questions is posed, which also serves as a prensetation for the purpose of the book. These questions surround the history of ideas, how they are shaped and influenced by experience and “what happens when ideas exceed or break apart social or analytic categories”, it is, in other words, an effort to expand the question on the black womanhood experience to an analytical model. The last question mentioned before is particularly useful, in that it shows how many corners in history, rich in knowledge, remain unexploited. As mentioned in “History of Black Women” the intersection between gender and race, women and blackness, forces historians to look deeper, to go beyond the usual sources at their reach and to discover hidden lifes from people who were church leaders, mothers, housekeepers or maids.
These articles also made me think of Trouillot and the existence of silences in History, which is a challenge that arises when examining a complex crossover like gender/race. Just by acknowledging that we face that problem when analyzing each category separately, it is natural that the same will hapen when analyzing both together. I think it is important to find this mixed categories, as they seem to demand more from us by challenging our existing categories and distorting our general picture of History.
I thought that this week’s readings were incredibly refreshing and important. I thought that the themes we discussed during the weeks on the Haitian Revolution have really stuck with me, namely the Unthinkable History. What this week’s readings reminded me of how unthinkable the Haitian Revolution was, and continues to be, because it inherently challenges white supremacy as well as the lack of framework that exists for understanding this part of history. The dehumanization essential to the unthinkability of the Haitian Revolution is directly linked to similar patterns that render Black American history as invisible. Black women’s history has continued to be marginalized, and the ability to develop scholarship that does justice to the diverse lived experiences of Black women. As explained in the introduction of Toward and Intellectual History of Black Women there are many historic and contemporary barriers that have created isolation for those uncovering Black women’s intellectual histories. This sort of academic and community isolation can be directly linked to “Black women rarely receiv[ing] attention as producers of knowledge” (2).
In November of 2016 legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw gave a TED Talk explaining “The urgency of Intersectionality”. Much like in her conversation about the human cost of the lack of framework that exists for conceptualizing the lived experiences of Black women the readings for this week have not only helped illuminate the ways in histories that challenge dominant sources of power continue to be marginalized. By connecting this weeks reading to Unthinkable History, the social, political and individual cost of the erasure and invisibilization of racialized experiences illustrates how these are connected to dominant understandings of {gendered) race today.
The readings we encountered this week come at a time when ideas of political and social consciousness are constantly being held at odds with identity, a time when what constitutes oppression, disenfranchisement, and societal exclusion are being refocused in a manner that denies historical fact its own objective reality. Central to the enormous rifts spreading across the US, as well as much of the western world, sits a mass misunderstanding of the intersectionality of human identities. However, as Martha Jones illustrates in her essay “Histories, Fictions, and Black Womanhood Bodies,” cultural misunderstanding of intersectionality is nothing new to the US political sphere. Jones appeals to the sensibilities of intersectional thought, that is to say an understanding of identities to be based on a compilation of contributing factors, to prove why pitting blackness against womanhood is mutually hampering to the success of both. Rather than being socially maligned positions at odds, Jones explores the ways aspects of intersectional identities compliment and complicate one another, and to put them in opposition denies the reality of those who inhabit the challenges of both (womanhood and blackness, in this example.)
However, the political movement of recent years, culminating in Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, illustrate that intersectionality is being contoured and manipulated reclaim dominance through white identitarianism. More space is being allocated to the fluidity of white identity, focusing on the economic depression of the white working class, while the identities of other races are being compacted into singular representations that threaten white identity (Muslims as terrorists, Latin Americans as criminals.) This movement could be described as the newest evolution of white flight, in that it is a response to demographic and social changes that upset established order. Alas, history often manifests cyclically, and by engaging the essays of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, displays the battles black women have had to endure throughout American history just to inhabit an intersectional understanding of their own identities. I read Farah J. Griffin’s essay on the life and work of Ann Petry, a champion of utilizing fiction and other writing as a means of exposing the social and physical realities faced by not just African American women, but the African American community at large. For me personally, Petry’s story “The Winding Sheet” displays this commitment to understanding how discrimination is intersectionally encountered and reproduced. By focusing on the merge of masculinity complexes with racial discrimination, “The Winding Sheet” is able to uncover the physical realities and violence racism reproduces, an idea that would eventually rattle the community when it was presented in full force through Ntzoke Shange’s legendary choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide.
This week’s readings reminded me of times when I have encountered issues understanding the intersectionality of gender and race, one which very much affects me however never really had the impulse to fully comprehend, perhaps because I failed to recognize how much it truly affects me or how it affects other women of colour when it comes to political discourse. Reading about Barack Obama’s political campaign and how he gained the support of Oprah Winfrey in 2008 in Jones’s chapter reminded me of another Black woman that I saw on TV around the time of this election. On Ellen DeGeneres’s show, before Hillary Clinton dropped out, Wanda Sykes was the guest, and Ellen asked her who she was going to vote for seeing as she was both a woman and black, and there was a woman candidate and a black male candidate. This is when I realized there was something that I personally hadn’t taken into consideration before, as Wanda responded to her something along the lines of respecting that Hillary was campaigning to be the first female president, however she had to vote for the Black candidate as she felt that a black president was more important to have, to her, than a female one. Though I must have been 12 or 13 at the time, this interview is what made me realize that there is an issue of representation as a whole, for which there seems to be only one open spot for a minority or underrepresented group at a time, but also that people’s identities are much more complex than just giving ourselves labels. This also ties into another part in Jones’s chapter where it is mentioned that Toni Morrison stated that she didn’t care for Clinton’s gender or Obama’s race, and that she “invoked a politics without ‘age, experience, race, or gender’” during the campaign (279). This passage brings about a sentiment with which I have an issue, since I find it impossible to even carry out one’s mundane quotidian activities without considering the fact that the people around you are different, and I find that ignoring this at trivial times, like presidential campaigns, brings about an issue of erasure of people’s concerns, experiences, identities, and history. As it is mentioned in Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, Black women, in particular, have struggled throughout history as they lie at the intersection of race and gender, and it is essential that we focus on their lived experiences and in uncovering their intellectual histories in order to understand our political present.
I also was reminded of Trouillot when going through this weeks readings. It was very interesting to see the way in which this weeks readings not only shed light on specific historic Black women’s experiences, but simultaneously form part of a greater movement that uncovers that challenges existing silences.