Black Feminist View Of African-American Women

Black feminist thought can be thought of as an understanding behind the intersectionality of race and sex. The assumption that race and sex can be divorced and examined separately prevents many people from grasping the concept of black feminist thought. African-American women are a part of a minority race and minority sex, which they must live with on a daily basis. Therefore, examining race and sex separately is a distorted, biased, and inaccurate view on African-American women in society. As a member of the two of the lowest castes in American society, being a woman and being black, African-American women are often marginalized. When the topic of black people is at hand the focus tends to be on men, and when women are talked about the focus …show more content…
Patricia Hill Collins believes that “developing adequate definitions of Black feminist thought involves facing this complex nexus of relationships among biological classification, the social construction of race and gender as categories of analysis, the material conditions accompanying these changing social constructions, and Black women’s consciousness about these themes” (Collins, 243). One way to begin to define black feminist thought is to examine a Black women’s standpoint— ideas and experiences shared by African-American women that provide a unique angle of vision on self, community, and society (Collins, 243). If the relationship between a Black women’s standpoint and theories that interpret their experiences is found, then the concept of Black feminist can more easily be addressed. Collins “suggest[s] that Black feminist thought consists of specialized knowledge created by African-American women which clarifies a standpoint of and for Black women” (Collins, 243). Collins argues that Black women occupy a unique standpoint on their own oppression composed of two interlocking components: a Black women’s political and economic status, which provides them with a distinctive set of experiences that offers a different view of material reality than that available to other groups and a distinctive Black feminist consciousness concerning that material reality is stimulated by their experiences. Collins’ view follows the general standpoint logic that a subordinate group not only experiences a different reality than a dominant group, but a subordinate group may also interpret that reality (or their reality) differently than a dominant group. The distinction between the differences in reality and thought in a subordinate group versus a dominant group only emphasizes the connection between what one does and how one