The Negro Question, the Woman Question, and the “Vital Link”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Higashida
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Black Belt ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Old Left ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

This chapter provides a history of Black internationalist feminism. It begins with the intertwinings of Black nationalist and Old Left movements in the interwar years, with special attention to the Black Belt Nation Thesis, which produced political solidarities beyond the limited affiliations engendered and policed by U.S. liberal democracy. While putting the Black Belt Nation Thesis into practice entrenched Left masculinism more fully, several leading Black Communists transformed the meaning of self-determination to allow for intersectional analysis of race and gender and to address the “special oppressed status” of Black women. In doing so, African American Left women in particular paved the way for postwar Black feminism, which Claudia Jones definitively theorized. The chapter then demonstrates how the activism and analysis of African American women on the Old Left such as Maude White Katz and Louise Thompson Patterson laid grounds for postwar Black feminism.

THOSE SEGREGATED AND SACRED HOURS: New Perspectives on Religion, Race, and Gender in America

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-331
Author(s):  
Cheryl Townsend Gilkes
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
University Of California ◽  
American Women ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender

Mark Chaves, Congregations in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, 291 pages, ISBN 0-674-01284-4, Cloth, $29.95.Marla F. Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003, 263 pages, ISBN 0-520-23394-8, Cloth, $50.00, Paper, $19.95.Carolyn Moxley Rouse, Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004, 271 pages, ISBN 0-520-23795-1, Cloth, $50.00, Paper, $19.95.

Michelle Obama as a Political Symbol: Race, Gender, and Public Opinion toward the First Lady

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (03) ◽  
pp. 431-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Badas ◽  
Katelyn E. Stauffer
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Women ◽  
First Lady ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Michelle Obama ◽  
Political Symbol ◽  
And Gender

AbstractPopular commentary surrounding Michelle Obama focuses on the symbolic importance of her tenure as the nation's first African American first lady. Despite these assertions, relatively few studies have examined public opinion toward Michelle Obama and the extent to which race and gender influenced public evaluations of her. Even fewer studies have examined how the intersection of race and gender influenced political attitudes toward Michelle Obama and her ability to serve as a meaningful political symbol. Using public opinion polls from 2008 to 2017 and data from the Black Women in America survey, we examine public opinion toward Michelle Obama as a function of respondents’ race, gender, and the intersection between the two. We find that African Americans were generally more favorable toward Michelle Obama than white Americans, with minimal differences between men and women. Although white women were no more likely than white men to view Michelle Obama favorably, we find that they were more likely to have information on Michelle Obama's “Let's Move” initiative. Most importantly, we find that Michelle Obama served as a unique political symbol for African American women and that her presence in politics significantly increased black women's evaluation of their race-gender group.

Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eden Wales Freedman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Testimonial Literature ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Sojourner Truth ◽  
Elizabeth Keckley ◽  
Critical Conversation ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
And Gender

Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma: Confronting Race, Gender, and Violence in American Literature treats reader response to traumatic and testimonial literature written by and about African American women. Theorists emphasize the necessity of writing about—or “witnessing”—trauma to overcome it. To this critical conversation, Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma adds insight into the engagement of testimonial literature, articulating a theory of reading (or “dual-witnessing”) that explores how narrators and readers can witness trauma together. The book then places its original theories of traumatic reception in conversation with the African American literary tradition to speak to the histories, cultures, and traumas of African Americans, particularly the repercussions of slavery, as witnessed in American literature. This book also considers intersections of race and gender and how narrators and readers can cross such constructs to witness collectively. Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma’s innovative examinations of raced-gendered intersections open and speak with those works that promote dual-witnessing through the fraught (literary) histories of race and gender relations in America. To explicate how dual-witnessing converses with American literature, race theory, and gender criticism, the book analyzes emancipatory narratives by Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley and novels by William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Jesmyn Ward.

Faith Ringgold’s Story Quilts

2018 ◽  
pp. 196-213
Author(s):  
Hertha D. Sweet Wong
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Visual Field ◽  
Square Functions ◽  
Art Gallery ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
American Artist ◽  
History Of ◽  
Entire Visual Field ◽  
And Gender

African American artist Faith Ringgold’s oversized story quilts are painted and stitched image-text narratives on fabric intended to be hung on art gallery walls. In all her work she thematizes race and gender, part of her project to revise historical misrepresentations and generate more accurate depictions. This chapter discusses Ringgold’s various interventions in a long history of textual and visual domination, noting also Ringgold’s innovations: how quilt squares function simultaneously as individual images or texts and as part of the entire visual field. Each quilt square functions as a page, while a series of quilt squares can function also as a frame. The sets of relations between page and frame and between image and text are multiple and variable.

By Black Women’s Hands: Building Equitable Justice

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-77
Author(s):  
Livia Maria San’t AnnaE Sant’Anna Vaz
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
The Other ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Brazilian Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
System Data ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Social Vulnerabilities

The article evinces the need for the inclusion of Black women in the Brazilian justice system if equitable justice is to be achieved. The intersecting oppressions of race and gender to which Black women have been subjected down through the colonialist, slave-owning history of Brazil are still conditioning Black women’s access to spaces of power, notedly in the Brazilian justice system. Data are presented that illustrate the effects of institutional racism and sexism on justice officials, particularly how the dearth of Black women – the most vulnerabilized social category in Brazilian society – produces a single, white-centric, androcentric interpretation that ultimately makes the achievement of justice a white man’s privilege. From this perspective, Black women find themselves at a kind of intersectional crossroads that, on one hand, reinforces their social vulnerabilities while, on the other hand, it potentializes their ability to foster an epistemological, hermeneutic transformation inside the justice system, aimed at building a system that incorporates gender and race equity.

Michelle Obama, the Media Circus, and America’s Racial Obsession

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
First Ladies ◽  
Cable News ◽  
Michelle Obama ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Political Attack

This chapter shifts the focus to Michelle Obama, a figure whose family's experiences of enslavement, emancipation, and northward migration make her nearly as important a cultural figure as her husband. It explains how media coverage of Michelle Obama during the campaign was shaped not only by Americans' expectations of prospective first ladies, but by a long history of powerful stereotypes of black women and their bodies. While praised and admired by many, Michelle Obama had become a target whose attackers utilized an ever-expanding twenty-four/seven cable news cycle and the unprecedented forum of the blogosphere to promulgate every sort of personal and political attack. In the process, they dredged up deep-seated stereotypes of African American women—the domineering “mammy,” the hypersexualized “jezebel,” the more recently minted “angry black woman”—and used them to construct an unappealing and even threatening image of the candidate's wife.

scholarly journals African American Women Scholars and International Research: Dr. Anna Julia Cooper’s Legacy of Study Abroad

2009 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Y. Evans
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Study Abroad ◽  
African American Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Anna Julia Cooper ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women's Tradition ◽  
Intellectual Production

In this article, a little-known but detailed history of Black women’s tradition of study abroad is presented. Specifically, the story of Dr. Anna Julia Cooper is situated within the landscape of historic African American students who studied in Japan, Germany, Jamaica, England, Italy, Haiti, India, West Africa, and Thailand, in addition to France. The story of Cooper’s intellectual production is especially intriguing because, at a time when Black women were just beginning to pursue doctorates in the United States, Anna Cooper chose to earn her Ph.D. from the Sorbonne in Paris. In this article, it is demonstrated that her research agenda and institutional choice reflected a popular trend of Black academics to construct their scholarly identities with an international foundation. The intersection of race, gender, nationality, language, and culture are critical areas of inquiry from which to study higher education. 

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