Making Privilege and Power Visible

Hill Collins examines a concept which she labels the sexual politics of black womanhood. By this term, she means that there is a history and a process through which Black women's sexuality has been interpreted and represented, which for the most part, has been done in terms of the privilege of other social groups to mis-name and mis-represent images of black women. Because of the hierarchy of social roles or social power that white men have as males and as whites who structure the dominant culture, that white women have as part of a white dominant culture, even though they are also subjugated as women, and that black men have as males, even though they are also subjugated because of race, and that heterosexuals have because to be straight is to be considered "normal," black women as a group have not had the power to name themselves, to create images and language for understanding their sexuality on their own terms. On your blogs, I want you to begin to apply some of Hill Collins' key terminology to an analysis of the pop culture representations that YOU see in your daily lives. Referring to the sterotypes that Hill Collins examines in Chapter Four, (mammies, matriarchs, the welfare mother, the Black lady/middle-class professional, the hoochie) what examples can you find of how American society mis-represents black women's bodies and sexual identities? Feel free to add pictures or links to whatever you find on the web, and describe in your posts what the stereotypes are as you see them, and consider their impact on all of us who view them. This is not the end of the conversation that we need to have about sexuality, power and stereotypes, but a starting point for making ourselves aware of the problems with images that we see everyday.

Is Barack Obama an African American?

Your Anderson and Stewart text opens Chapter Three with a generous and insightful quote from historian Robert Harris: "Afro-American historiography, with its own conceptual and methodological concerns, is now poised to illuminate the Afro-American past in a manner that will broaden and deepen our knowledge of black people in this country. The writing of Afro-American history is no longer undertaken principally to revise the work of wrongheaded White historians, to discern divine providence, to show black participation in the nation's growth and development, to prove the inevitability of black equality, or to demonstrate the inexorable progress made by Afro-Americans. It is conducted as a distinct area of inquiry, within the discipline of history, with black people as its primary focus to reveal their thought and activities over time and place (43)." How do you see this idea of black people's thought and activities as the focus of black history in parallel with the discussion of self-naming and racial identification that begins in Chapter One? Is there some kind of relationship between the contemporary debates over categories of racial identification, and the historical legacy that defines people of African descent/black Americans/African Americans as a group? And how does this problem of self-naming look differently when we consider someone with a background and a personal history like our President's? What does African American history mean for African American studies?

The HistoryMakers

"Black feminist thought and practice respond to a fundamental contradiction of U.S. society. On the one hand, democratic promises of individual freedom, equality under the law, and social justice are made to all American citizens. Yet on the other hand, the reality of differential group treatment based on race, class, gender, sexuality and citizenship persists. Groups organized around race, class, and gender in and of themselves are not inherently a problem. However, when African-Americans, poor people, women, and other groups discriminated against see little hope for group-based advancement, this situation constitutes social injustice." Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (2000), page 23

In fact, the group identity, and the awareness of shared history, leads to discussion and organization around shared solutions; by contrast, the rhetoric of color blindness has the negative effect of making the social inequalities themselves invisible, if we are unable to talk about the ways in which different treatment affects groups differently. What we seek in recognizing this history of racial and gender discrimination is understanding of the ways in which both forms are entrenched in American society, and interlocking in their effects. The problems themselves cannot simply disappear, or be wished away, without some difficult examination, without some challenging confrontations with the status quo.

In examining the HistoryMakers database, you will hear many stories of the ways in which black women and men experience a different reality, but you will also hear stories about how these individuals came to commit themselves to changing this reality. What are some of those transformative situations and encounters that the subjects talk about in their interviews? You should continue your research in the database by finding and analyzing some of these stories.

What is the White Mainstream?

What does it mean to identify certain cultural norms and values as white (and middle class)? When do values stop being white (and/or middle class and/or Western) and start becoming human?

Tell Me More

What do you hope to learn from this class, and how might this new knowledge apply to your (prospective) major and/or professional life?

Beginning Considerations--Starting the Blog, Starting the Course

Now that you have finished reading Chapters 1 and 2 in Anderson and Stewart, and Chapter 1 in Hill-Collins, take some time to reflect on their significance. What does reading this material make you want to know more about? List three facts presented in these chapters that surprised you, and list 3 questions about the assigned chapters that I and your classmates can respond to further.

Introductions, For Real, Y'all

Tell me: your major, your place of birth, your class standing. Identify and describe your campus or larger community memberships, and your future goals (Are the two connected in some way?)