Black Feminist Thought

Retracing the Roots of Black Feminist Thought

Black feminist thought is a framework that recognizes that all black women develop a distinct standpoint and strategies that enable their survival as a marginalized and maligned social group in an unjust society—a society, more specifically, that is entrenched in what Black feminist intellectual and cultural critic bell hooks has termed “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Even though this framework is informed by black women's distinct yet interrelated standpoints, lived experiences, and day-to-day struggles, Black feminist thought emerged from the writings and discourse of a burgeoning community of Black feminist intellectuals or academics throughout the last quarter of the 20th century. Many of the core assumptions of Black feminist thought date back to the writings, speeches, organizing, and political activism of a “privileged” community of black women associated with the abolitionist, antiracist, woman's suffrage, and black women's club movements.

Early Black feminist consciousness emerged during an era (1830s-1900) in U.S. history that is marked by two sociopolitical movements. On one hand, scholars and activists confronted the “race question” or issues concerning the discriminatory treatment of nonwhite U.S. citizens (primarily [enslaved] blacks) as well as the systemic inequalities that resulted. On the other hand, social activism and critical discourse centered on the “woman question” or issues relating to women's suffrage, equal rights, and sexual freedom.

Black feminists (such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Pauline Hopkins, Maria Stewart, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Mary Church Terrell) were fully committed to both causes but also found themselves torn between these two movements. These early Black feminists recognized and criticized the one-dimensional nature of each movement's political objectives (i.e., race centered or gender centered). The lived experiences of these Black feminist foremothers, like that of all black women, facilitated an awareness or level of sociopolitical consciousness that was perceptive of the interconnectedness or interlocking nature of these oppressions.

For these early Black feminists, any struggle for social justice that ignored or dismissed the interplay between racial and sex oppression was futile. In both their personal and political lives, early Black feminists, and black women in general, were incapable of isolating or separating the oppression they faced as black persons from the oppression they faced as women. As a result of this shared social reality, early Black feminists were the first public intellectuals and social activists to develop and articulate a holistic and humanist approach to combating social injustice in the United States. These relatively well-educated and politically astute black women drew on their perspectives as blacks to forge a sociopolitical consciousness that problematized a one-dimensional response to oppression. Early black feminists were the embodiment of multiple oppressions, and they challenged the movement politics of their day to recognize that the multiple oppressions black women inescapably confront are neither mutually exclusive nor separable. This reality was central to the writings and discourse of these women; it was a guiding principle behind their sociopolitical organizing and activism and it inspired Black feminist thought.

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