Celebrating Black Women and Girls: 50 Years of Black Women’s Studies
Introduction by series curator David Green, director of diversity and inclusion at the Sage Colleges. Dr. Green is a Black queer feminist and is working on a cultural history of black queer writers in America.
Celebrating scholarly inquiry that centers Black Women and Girls is a political act; and, for me as editor of this essay series, an act of love. Loving Black women and girls in today’s political climate is also necessary. Black women have always been engaged in the fight for racial and gender justice, sexual freedom, and as Alice Walker reminds us in The World Will Follow Joy, environmental and planetary humanism and survival. However, Black women and girls are often maligned and entrenched by institutions of oppression that labor to bury and deny not only their existence but for their value and contributions to every single notion of “progress” the world over. In other words, we suffer from historical amnesia, or, the tendency to ignore and forget Black women’s histories of activism. Such historical amnesia is maintained today by the institutions of patriarchy, racial capitalism, and political oppression.
Additionally, day-to-day violences haunt the lives of Black women and girls, too. I say violences to signal the multiple intersectionalities of violence that Black women and girls face institutionally, interpersonally, and in silence — or what historian Darlene Clark Hine calls a “culture of dissemblance”. Dissemblance, in short, simultaneously protects Black women from both the social backlash that results from speaking publicly about their surviving sexual violence and the psychological wages of having their truth questioned, shamed, and in many cases denied. In sum, the categorical rejecting of Black women and girls speaking the truth about their lived experiences with sexual violence recalls a question asked long ago by the Black feminist writer Abbey Lincoln: “who will revere the Black woman?” Lincoln’s question, birthed by both rage and passion, is just as important today as it was when she first posed the question in her essay by the same title — which she published in the September 1966 issue of Negro Digest.
Revering Black Women and Girls
This series reveres the Black Woman and Girl. The series also celebrates Black Women’s Studies. The advent of Black Women’s Studies in higher education has illuminated the rich, complex, powerful, and beautiful ways that Black women have long contributed to world affairs. In short, Black Women’s Studies — and specifically, Black women educators — have shown the various ways why Black women matter. Our celebrating Black Women, Girls, and Black Women Studies also signals an important milestone: Fifty years of Black Women’s Studies in Higher Education, as Stephanie Y. Evans reminds us.
Forged out of a need to address the unique and particular experiences of Black women in the United States, Black Women’s Studies have advanced intellectual thought and political praxis in profound, indelible, and numerous ways. Black Women’s Studies has given us critical vocabulary vital to social justice education. Black feminist vocabularies such as intersectionality, revolutionary divas, haute couture intellectualism, eloquent rage, and shapeshifters, speak to the specific ways that inventing language remains a politics of resistance for Black women and girls. Such Black feminist vocabularies speak against Western language constructs that busily stereotype black women and perpetually fail to name their humanity.
Furthermore, Black Women’s Studies has given us scores of game-changing Black women educators and scholars who teach through culturally relevant pedagogies that often rescue students of color wounded by the vicious and cyclical violence associated with traditional teaching methods in K-12 and post-secondary education. Furthermore, Black Women’s Studies has provided spaces to dismantle the legacies of colonization that ensnare higher education today. Through such dismantling, Black Women’s Studies enable Black women and girls to develop an invaluable consciousness about who they are, why they matter, and — as my students most certainly appreciate when reading novels by Black women and Black women’s history — spaces to embrace and express their #blackgirlmagic.
Black Women’s Studies: Born of Fire
To say that Black Women’s Studies emerged in higher education without fire would be to deny the inter-connected work of anti-black racism, sexism, and indeed misogynoir. Black Women’s Studies emerged at the cross-section of the Black and Women’s Liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s and their corresponding academic programs: Black Studies and Women’s Studies, respectively. As Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith note in their landmark volume All The Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: But Some of Us are Brave, these disciplines, however, neglected the particular experiences of Black women and girls. Black Women’s Studies address these gaps and provided a critical lens to study how Black women survived and, in some cases, thrived, in the face of anti-black racism, gender injustice, misogynoir, racial capitalism, and all forms of state-sanctioned violence.
Since its inception, Black Women’s Studies has influenced every field of study from the Humanities and Social Sciences to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education. Black Women’s Studies have enabled discussions of mental health and wellness, love, sex, desire, peace, justice, and family. It’s a field that always questions categories, even some of its own — advancing our thinking about intersectionality to, as Jennifer Nash theorizes, post-intersectionality. It is here, fifty years later, that the think-pieces in this series continue these conversations.
Collectively, the pieces in this series situate Black motherhood and girlhood issues in our contemporary setting — exploring their relationships to each other and how they navigate spaces while “tipping on a tightrope.” Indeed, writing implicitly against fifty-five years of the racist and sexist Moynihan Report, for example, the authors meditate on the politics of motherhood and daughterhood. They raise a few questions: How to be a mother and a daughter within a culture rife with stereotypes about them both? How to imagine Black women's and girls' emotional well-being and their generational influences and differences within histories of silence and ineffability? The authors discuss Black girlhood and the politics of hair and dress in the name of revolutionary beauty. Black girls’ and women’s complex experiences of vulnerability, strength, struggle, and success are worthy of inquiry and of elevation, and the series authors remind us of the importance of reminding Black girls and women of this truth. The series ends with a roundtable discussion that addresses the intersections between wellness and the workplace, and the ways Black Women’s Studies provides a needed intellectual and community space where Black women and girls can thrive beyond “their own rainbows.” Enjoy!
