Words of Fire by Beverly Guy-Sheftall Read Free Book Online

Project, whose newsletter Vital Signs provides black feminist perspectives on health, attracted the largest group of black women ever to assemble on Spelman’s campus.
    Black feminist theory would come of age during the 1990s and move from the margins to the center of mainstream feminist discourse. Patricia Hill Collins’s landmark Black Feminist Thought identified the fusion of activism and theory as its distinguishing characteristic, and analyzed its four core themes: the interlocking nature of race, class, and gender oppression in black women’s personal, domestic, and work lives; the necessity of internalizing positive self-definitions and rejecting the denigrating, stereotypical, and controlling images (mammy, matriarch, welfare mother, whore) of others, both within and without the black community; and the need for active struggle to resist oppression and realize individual and
group empowerment (Collins, 23, 32, 83—84). The Collins text would further establish, along with Toni Cade’s The Black Woman and bell hooks’s— Ain’t I a Woman, a continuous black feminist intellectual tradition going back to the publication of Cooper’s A Voice from the South a hundred years earlier.
    Despite their commitment to ending sexism, however, some black women continued to be alienated by the term “feminist.” Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) provided the alternative term “womanist” as a more culturally appropriate label for black feminists or feminists of color. “Womanist” recalled a black folk expression of mothers admonishing their daughters to refrain from “womanish” behavior. According to Walker, a “womanist” prefers women’s culture, is committed to the survival of the entire group, is serious, “loves struggle, loves the folk, and loves herself” (Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, xi-xii). Inspired by Walker, scholars such as Cheryl Gilkes, Katie Cannon, Jacquelyn Grant, Delores Williams, Renita Weems, and Emily Townes, for example, self-identify as “womanist” theologians as a way of differentiating themselves from white feminist theologians.
    President George Bush’s 1991 nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court and Professor Anita Hill’s subsequent allegations of sexual harassment, which resulted in televised hearings for three days in October, sparked perhaps the most profound intraracial tensions around sexual politics that the modern African American community had ever experienced. Despite Hill’s allegations that Thomas had sexually harassed her while she worked under him at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), on October 16 the Senate confirmed, 52—48, Clarence Thomas as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, replacing outgoing Thurgood Marshall.
    A month later, a cogent statement opposing the racist and sexist treatment of Anita Hill appeared in the November 17, 1991, issue of the New York Times (A—53), “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves.” Over 1,600 black women reminded the nation of Thomas’s persistent failure, despite his own racial history and professional opportunities, to respond to the urgency of civil rights for disadvantaged groups. Furthermore, the statement called attention to a long history of sexual abuse and stereotyping of black women as “immoral, insatiable, perverse.” The failure of Congress to take seriously Hill’s sexual harassment charges was perceived as an attack on the collective character of black women (Chrisman and Allen, 292).
    More than any other episode in recent memory, including the angry responses to Black Macho, For Colored Girls, and The Color Purple, the Thomas/Hill saga unmasked problematic gender attitudes within the black community and in some cases outright misogyny. Because Hill had violated
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