ENDNOTE
1 The College Language Association is the primary organization of black language and literature professionals, founded during the days when the Modern Language Association and the National Council of Teachers of English did not encourage black membership or participation.
Gloria Joseph
Gloria Joseph, writer, activist, and “black revolutionary spirited feminist of West Indian parents,” returned to her home in the Virgin Islands after retiring from the School of Social Science at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She coedited with Jill Lewis Common Differences (1981) in which she wrote a pioneering essay on mothers and daughters within the black community. Her essay “The Incompatible Menage A Trois: Marxism, Feminism and Racism,” which appeared in Women and Revolution (1981), refers to racism as the “incestuous child of patriarchy and capitalism” that white feminists frequently ignore in Marxist analyses of the woman question. She also argues that Marxists and feminists do a poor job of analyzing the experiences of black women. Her essay “Black Feminist Pedagogy and Schooling in Capitalist White America” is an early critique of the academy and an important contribution to black feminist discourse on education in the United States. Joseph, along with Alexis de Veaux, is completing a biography of Audre Lorde.
BLACK FEMINIST PEDAGOGY AND SCHOOLING IN CAPITALIST WHITE AMERICA
Schools and schooling in capitalist America are very little different from other institutions and their methodological processes in capitalist America. Institutions operate from a well-programmed blueprint, which is designed to serve the people in an unequal and hierarchical manner. To “serve the people” can be readily translated into “to serve the devil.” The heinous nature of capitalist America gives easy rise to a feeling of existing in a living hell for the majority of the exploited, who indeed exist for the benefit of those with and in power. The educational system orchestrates an internecine relationship between teachers and students. This relationship, which results in miseducated, misguided, misinformed youth, and adults (leaders) who use “disinformation” tactics and chicanery, operates today with maximum success in keeping the inequalities and hierarchies that characterize capitalist America.
In Schooling in Capitalist America, Bowles and Gintis state: “The major characteristics of the educational system in the United States today flow directly from its role in producing a work force willing and able to staff occupational positions in the capitalist system. We conclude that the creation of an equal and liberating school system requires a revolutionary transformation of economic life.”1 That was written in 1976. In 1903, the great scholar and Afro-American leader, W. E. B. Du Bois, stated: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, the relation of the darker to the lighter races . . . in Africa and Asia, in America and in the islands of the sea.”2
The integration of Du Bois’s prophetic words with the quote from Bowles and Gintis, gives a greater sense of realism and accuracy to the current educational system in capitalist America.
The exclusion of the race question as a distinct entity, in any theoretical discussion of capitalist America, is a serious omission, and any analysis that does not specifically address the racial dimension is incomplete and inadequate. Racial relations and the United States educational system have an extremely inglorious past, which presently demands acute attention. It could be argued that every relationship is unique, and race relations have no patent on uniqueness; that no general theories are adequate, and from this point of view, most theories are too general. However, there is ample evidence to indicate that relations between races have a long and important history that is not reducible to relations between the sexes or classes.
The American dream has never worked for blacks, and that is a truism that must be remembered whenever analysis and discussion concerning the future of the nation’s population are in progress. To say that “. . . the creation of an equal and liberating school system requires a revolutionary transformation of economic life” is to disregard the dynamics of the racial dimension. The absence of a sharp focus on racism inhibits the social change desired. I am in agreement with the statement that the role of the educational system in America today is to produce a work force willing and able to staff occupational positions in the capitalist system. However, this statement is basically applicable to the white population in America. There exists a significantly large body of blacks and Latinos who are not in the economic work force at all. A most radical approach to dealing with the problems of radical educational change would be to focus on the blacks, Latinos, Native Americans—the domestic Third World people—as the vanguard. Historically in the United States of America, those fighting racism have been in the vanguard of social movements. The struggle for racial equality, which serves as a generational linkage, provides the nation with a focus that is the antithesis of the avaricious, necrophilic, aggressive, materialistic, selfish, attitudes that characterize the dominant Western perspective. The history of nonwhites in the United States of America, a history that is grounded in a spirituality that places interpersonal relations among people, as opposed to the acquisition of objects, as being of highest value, should be a major focus of education. Education has always been central in antiracist struggle, for education—or the denial of it—has been integral to the maintenance of a racist society. In Puerto Rico and among native people in North America, education was used by the United States to force children to speak English, to learn United States history, to adopt “American” culture, all part of an effort to destroy the fabric of traditional culture and society, in order to better control subjugated peoples. For similar reasons, it was made illegal in the south to teach African people held in slavery to read or write. I am arguing for and advocating an educational system that uses the history of blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans. In America, their values, struggles, exploitation as building blocks towards developing revolutionary education that equals “truthful history!” “An understanding of history is critical in shaping an awareness of the present and the vision for a viable future.”3
In the struggle to ensure that the young be allowed to learn accurate and inclusive history of African Americans, Asian Americans, Chicanos, Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, women of all groups, and the history of menialjobs-working-class people, we will necessarily be informing ourselves and others of what that history is, how it shaped our present, and how those who came before us have struggled to create necessary change. Learning that history will help to shatter the prevailing mythology that inhibits so many from acting more decisively for social change and to create a more just society and viable future for all.
Schooling in white capitalist America reproduces capitalist social relations of production, and this system of education is, and has been, detrimental to the livelihood of blacks. My participation in this educational system is done within the degrees of contradiction that I have allowed myself. That is to say that since morally I cannot contribute to the continuation of the exploitation of blacks, in my role as educator I view the educational system as a system in its own right constituted by intrinsic imperatives, and capable of creating building blocks for radical changes in the structure of American capitalist society. It is in this spirit that I introduce the black feminist pedagogy that I feel complements and goes beyond the Marxist sociology of education.
The economic and political status of Afro-American women, as an oppressed group in the United States of America provides its members with a distinctive experiential reality, and disparate explanations of that reality as well. As a subordinate group (subordinate to the dominant Eurocentric masculine corporate powerhouse), Afro-American women have a well developed alternative way of producing and validating knowledge about their experienced reality. The validations of their experienced realities differ markedly from explanations offered by the dominant Eurocentric masculine viewpoint.
Afro-American women’s lives have been greatly affected by the intersection of systems of racia
l, sexual, and class oppressions. However, they have developed a unique black female culture whose purpose is to foster authentic black female self-definition and self-valuation that counters and transcends the multiple structures of oppressions that they face.4
Literature on black women reveals that Afro-American women do not see themselves as objects; do not identify with those in power; and have produced an independent black women’s point of view about their specific experiences with oppression. By and large, the literature tells us that Afro-American women have a realistic, commonsense, rational view of their relationship to the dominant society and do not operate on false illusions about their chances for survival or success.
The existence of a functional black women’s point of view assumes that there is an extant body of specialized knowledge that can be identified as black feminist thought, and this existing body of knowledge is an authentic representation of a black women’s viewpoint. In other words it can be assumed that a unique, self-defined black women’s consciousness exists concerning black women’s material reality and that this point of view on reality has been authentically articulated in a body of knowledge that can be labeled BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT.5
The feminist sociologist, Chandra Talapado Mohanty, in a brilliant paper on The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought, concludes that there are four criteria that appear to characterize an alternative epistemology (how we know what we know) used by Afro-American women in evaluating and validating their point of view/perspectives. They are (i) the use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims; (ii) the centrality of personal expressiveness; (iii) the ethic of personal accountability; and (iv) concrete experience as a criterion of meaning.6 These criteria will be demonstrated in the section of this chapter where classroom examples of black feminist pedagogy are presented. The practice of black feminist pedagogy embodies these four criteria.
Black feminist pedagogy is designed to raise the political consciousness of students by introducing a worldview with an Afrocentric orientation to reality, and the inclusion of gender and patriarchy as central to an understanding of all historical phenomena. The presence of an independent black women’s point of view using an alternative epistemology is fundamentally significant because its existence challenges not only the content of what currently passes as “truth,” but simultaneously challenges the process of arriving at that truth. Specifically I am presenting a pedagogy with a structure of an underlying philosophy that will generate a new political consciousness. This is akin to the philosophical structure, the ideology, of the great Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, who developed a unique method of teaching reading, which was formulated on his discovery that adults can begin to read in a matter of forty hours if the first words they decipher are charged with political meaning.
Similarly political, social, and economic concepts, from a curriculum planned and taught by teachers possessing a black feminist perspective/ consciousness, would introduce a radical educational methodological imperative.
The introduction of a black feminist perspective as the radical construct in the pedagogy that I am discussing regards gender and patriarchy as critical in the constructing of society (and that patriarchy reflects white men’s worldviews, perspectives, and interests).
Black feminist pedagogy embodies a philosophy that is a philosophy of liberation. Black feminism’s major premise is the active engagement in the struggle to overcome the oppressions of racism, heterosexism, and classism, as well as sexism. It encompasses a worldview with the inclusion of gender and patriarchy as central to an understanding of all historical phenomena, and addresses Third World women at home and abroad. The black feminist perspective of which I speak intrinsically encompasses the application of an Afrocentric orientation to reality that is rooted in history, a reality that is informed by an understanding of the structures of African culture.
In discussing the black feminist perspective, it is important to be mindful of the fact that we are simultaneously talking about a conceptual system. A conceptual system refers to those philosophical constructs we use to define and structure reality, and is therefore basic to the way in which we perceive and interpret. It is the basis of our worldview. All people have a conceptual system usually shaped for the most part by the culture with which they identify. The relationship of one’s conceptual system worldview and behavior, are internally consistent.7 Tragically, the American school system has systematically and deliberately denied its nonwhite clientele the right to identify with their cultures. Rather, we have students “thinking white” as a result of the white, male studies programs that have dominated education throughout its beleaguered history.
The Afrocentric conceptual system is not exclusively black or exclusively African. It is a journey toward wholeness that requires seeing the world not black or white, but in its full spectrum.
The curriculum in our schools today can correctly be called a “white studies” and a “male studies” program, focusing on the achievements, cultures, experiences, and perspectives of white men and omitting or distorting the histories, experiences, cultures, and perspectives of people of color, and women of all colors. There have been some changes since the 1960s, but much of its has been superficial. A few great men of color and a few women of various colors are now referred to, but little is said of the great movements for social change that countless and nameless women and men have taken part in in the United States of America. There are occasional mentions of discrimination, but students are led to believe it results from the prejudiced attitudes of some misguided folks rather than from the deliberate policies and practices of white- and male-dominated institutions. Sex-biased language such as “the pioneer took his wife and family west” has been changed to “the pioneer family moved West,” but the different experiences of “pioneer” women in a patriarchal society are no more considered today than are the experiences of native women and men whose lands are being invaded.
“In order for students, male and female, to understand and be prepared to change this patriarchal capitalist society, they must learn the history of women’s experiences in this land, from the Cherokee grandmother on the Trail of Tears to the black mother in slavery’s chains, from the Chicana fighting her people’s dispossession to the Puertoriqueña fighting for her nation’s independence, from the young white woman newly working in Lowell’s mills in the early 1900s, from the middle-class “lady” to that unsurpassable Sojourner Truth! They must learn the similarities and differences among women’s experiences and between women and men’s experiences.” 8 And they must learn about the black experience in America as experienced by blacks, and not as interpreted from a perspective based on Eurocentric ideological constructs and values.
Black feminist pedagogy as a philosophy of liberation for humankind, is designed to enable students, through the social, economic, cultural, moral, and religious history of Third World people, to reexamine and see the world through a perspective that would instill a revolutionary, conscious, liberating ideology. Black feminist pedagogy will be the medium for the message. The art and science of teaching as advocated by black feminist philosophy involves direct schooling for the future that holds viable options other than slave-slave master, or corporate giant-woeful worker, relationships. Students will be the building blocks, the true agents for radical change. The teaching of history from the black feminist perspective is not to imply a one-sided view of history, for as Raya Dunayevskaya so eloquently states in her essay, “Women as Thinkers and Revolutionaries,” “There is no such thing as black history that is not also white history. There is no such thing as women’s history that is not the actual history of humanity’s struggle toward freedom.”9
In discussing social relations in capitalist America, it is of critical importance to begin to examine the minds of the slave captor, power makers, or corporate monsters (however you wish to call those who control capitalist America) from the Afrocentric perspective. If the conceptual system has any validity, any value, it wil
l be important to be able to compare and contrast for people two conceptual systems, that of the oppressed and that of the oppressors, because the two systems have different and very real consequences for their adherents....
Black feminist philosophy incorporates a conceptual system capable of being measured against other conceptual systems, and black feminist pedagogy will examine the capitalist mentality as well as the history and philosophy of the Native American Indians who believed that one can no more own the land that is a source of provision for humans and animals than one can own the air above the land. Teachers applying black feminist techniques do not view students as passive recipients. We need only to review the history of student uprisings worldwide to realize their revolutionary potential. What has been lacking in most of their social movements has been a well formulated ideology—one that has been instilled and internalized from an early age. Schooling in capitalist America has indeed instilled an ideology, but one designed to maintain the status quo. The black feminist pedagogy will supply students with an ideology that will provide the necessary materials for creating conditions needed for radical change.
Black feminist theory is a theory of change with black feminist pedagogy being the change agent in and outside of the classrooms—wherever education takes place. Black feminist theory does not see class as the primary contradiction with the working class being the agents for change. Rather it sees the primary contradiction to be power relations between blacks and whites, males and females, with black women being the change agents. Black feminist theory and Marxism both function on the premise that you have to look at specific historical forms of oppression, and that power has to be reconstituted, reconstructed, to help find a weak link. Black feminist theory challenges Marxist theory to consider race as a primary contradiction, and it challenges feminists (white feminist theorists) to recognize the automatic dual oppression of sexism and racism that Afro-American and all women of color in the United States face with a routineness akin to breathing. Black feminists ask Marxist and white feminists, “Is our liberation going to be a part of your revolution? And if so why is it not a major topic in your theory building—in your literature—in your consciousness?”
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