Black Internationalist Feminism

This introductory chapter describes Black internationalist feminism. Black internationalist feminism challenged heteronormative and masculinist articulations of nationalism while maintaining the importance, even centrality, of national liberation movements for achieving Black women's social, political, and economic rights. As a corollary of the Communist Party's Black Belt Nation Thesis—which prioritized African American struggles for equality, justice, and self-determination—women of the Black Left asserted that Black women had special problems that could not be deferred or subsumed within the rubrics of working-class or Black oppression and that in fact were integral to the universal struggle for human rights and economic freedom. Moreover, women of the Black Left understood that essential to the liberation of African Americans, the Third World, and the worldwide proletariat was the fight against heteropatriarchy, which exacerbated oppression within as well as between nations.