Denying African-American women the credentials to become literate certainly excluded most African-American women from positions as scholars, teachers, authors, poets, and critics. This larger system of oppression works to suppress the ideas of Black women intellectuals and to protect elite White male interests and worldviews. Taken together, the supposedly seamless web of economy, polity, and ideology function as a highly effective system of social control designed to keep African-American women in an assigned, subordinate place. inner cities demonstrate the continuation of these earlier forms of Black women’s economic exploitation (Brewer 1993 Omolade 1994). The millions of impoverished African-American women ghettoized in Philadelphia, Birmingham, Oakland, Detroit, and other U.S.

The drudgery of enslaved African-American women’s work and the grinding poverty of “free” wage labor in the rural South tellingly illustrate the high costs Black women have paid for survival. Survival for most African-American women has been such an all-consuming activity that most have had few opportunities to do intellectual work as it has been traditionally defined. capitalism-the “iron pots and kettles” symbolizing Black women’s long-standing ghettoization in service occupations-represents the economic dimension of oppression (Davis 1981 Marable 1983 Jones 1985 Amott and Matthaei 1991). First, the exploitation of Black women’s labor essential to U.S. scholarship: “As a student doing research in the United States, I was amazed by the amount of information on Black South African women, and shocked that only a minuscule amount was actually written by Black women themselves” (Baloyi 1995,41).Īfrican-American women’s oppression has encompassed three interdependent dimensions. Similarly, South African businesswoman Danisa Baloyi describes her astonishment at the invisibility of African women in U.S. For example, several authors in Heidi Mirza’s (1997) edited volume on Black British feminism identify their invisibility and silencing in the contemporary United Kingdom. Black women engaged in reclaiming and constructing Black women’s knowledges often point to the politics of suppression that affect their projects.

Maintaining the invisibility of Black women and our ideas not only in the United States, but in Africa, the Caribbean, South America, Europe, and other places where Black women now live, has been critical in maintaining social inequalities. Suppressing the knowledge produced by any oppressed group makes it easier for dominant groups to rule because the seeming absence of dissent suggests that subordinate groups willingly collaborate their own victimization (Scott 1985). The shadow obscuring this complex Black women’s intellectual tradition is neither accidental nor benign.

Black feminist epistemology collins