Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment
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...…the Internal Colonial model (Bonilla & Girling, 1973; Blauner, 2001), Marxism (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Barrera, 1979), Chicana and Black feminisms (Anzaldúa, 1987; hooks, 1990; Zavella, 1991; Hurtado, 1996; Hill Collins, 1998, 2000; Saldivar-Hull, 2000) and cultural nationalism (Asante, 1987)....
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...Alongside other ‘Outsider’ scholars (Hill Collins, 1986) Crenshaw (2002) was ‘looking for both a critical space in which race was foregrounded and a race space where critical themes were central’ (p. 19)....
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...As a student of Chicana/o Studies, the theoretical models informing my work included the Internal Colonial model (Bonilla & Girling, 1973; Blauner, 2001), Marxism (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Barrera, 1979), Chicana and Black feminisms (Anzaldúa, 1987; hooks, 1990; Zavella, 1991; Hurtado, 1996; Hill Collins, 1998, 2000; Saldivar-Hull, 2000) and cultural nationalism (Asante, 1987)....
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...Indeed, if some knowledges have been used to silence, marginalize and render People of Color invisible, then ‘Outsider’ knowledges (Hill Collins, 1986), mestiza knowledges (Anzaldúa, 1987) and transgressive knowledges (hooks, 1994) can value the presence and voices of People of Color, and can reenvision the margins as places empowered by transformative resistance (hooks, 1990; Delgado Bernal, 1997; Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001)....
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Cites background from "Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, ..."
...Black women may view such experiences as one aspect of racism, because Black men have also been subject to gendered racism (Collins, 2004). In this case, the use of interaction effects also assumes that the effect of multiple category memberships is to influence the quantity of outcomes, rather than interacting to influence the outcome qualitatively: As Levin et al. (2002) concluded, “types of discrimination perceived by various ethnic and gender groups may be qualitatively different and may not necessarily ‘add up’ or ‘interact’ in a statistical quantitative sense” (p. 560). Testing intersectional research questions by looking at interactions between categories can undertheorize the processes that create the categories represented as independent variables. Put another way, treating race and gender as independent variables suggests that these social categories are primarily properties of individuals rather than reflections of macrolevel social practices linked to inequality (Weber & Parra-Medina, 2003). For example, sociologists have found meaningful differences between White and Black Americans’ experiences of being middle class. Primarily because of many years of redlining practices in mortgage lending, Black families with middle-class incomes have less than half the net worth of White families with comparable incomes (Conley, 1999); because of ongoing residential segregation, Black middle-class communities are more likely to be geographically surrounded by poor communities and to have higher rates of crime (Pattillo-McCoy, 1999). Compared to middle-class Whites, middle-class Blacks are more likely to have a sibling in poverty (Pattillo-McCoy & Heflin, 1999), and thus the poor may seem less distant than they do to members of the White middle class. For these and other reasons, the psychological experience of middle-class status may differ by race in important ways. Of course, it is possible to address some of these discrepancies by controlling for covariates in statistical models. However, to the extent that the meaning of one independent variable (e.g., class) varies depending on the level of the other independent variable (e.g., race) is neither acknowledged nor measured—that is, whether a given status is experienced in different ways depending on the other statuses held—an important aspect of intersectionality remains unaddressed and invisible. These observations suggest that the inclusion of statistical interactions among race, gender, and other social categories in multivariate analyses is not, in and of itself, sufficient to develop what Smith and Stewart (1983) called a “truly interactive model of racism and sexism” (p. 6) without reconceptualizing the ways researchers use race, gender, and other social categories. These problems are not intrinsic to a research design (or statistical model) in which social categories are treated as independent variables; rather, they arise from the ways that statistical interactions between variables based on category membership are often interpreted in the literature. Rather than prescribing—or proscribing—any particular research or data analysis technique, the concept of intersectionality entails a conceptual shift in the way researchers understand social categories. For example, experiments often examine two or more independent variables both in terms of main effects and interactions. Nevertheless, experimental methods are not antithetical to intersectional analysis. For example, Shih, Pittinsky, and Ambady (1999) looked at how the intersecting identities of Asian American women affected math performance, considering that this group is stereotyped positively in this domain by virtue of ethnicity and is stereotyped negatively because of gender....
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...history, however, economic exploitation, stereotyping, and lack of legal protection (Collins, 1990) served to deny Black women (and other women of color; see, e....
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...Black women may view such experiences as one aspect of racism, because Black men have also been subject to gendered racism (Collins, 2004). In this case, the use of interaction effects also assumes that the effect of multiple category memberships is to influence the quantity of outcomes, rather than interacting to influence the outcome qualitatively: As Levin et al. (2002) concluded, “types of discrimination perceived by various ethnic and gender groups may be qualitatively different and may not necessarily ‘add up’ or ‘interact’ in a statistical quantitative sense” (p....
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...…originating the term intersectionality, but almost concurrently other scholars were drawing attention to the limitations of analyses isolating race or gender as the primary category of identity, difference, or disadvantage (Hancock, 2007a; e.g., Collins, 1990; Hurtado, 1989; Smith & Stewart, 1983)....
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...Black women may view such experiences as one aspect of racism, because Black men have also been subject to gendered racism (Collins, 2004). In this case, the use of interaction effects also assumes that the effect of multiple category memberships is to influence the quantity of outcomes, rather than interacting to influence the outcome qualitatively: As Levin et al. (2002) concluded, “types of discrimination perceived by various ethnic and gender groups may be qualitatively different and may not necessarily ‘add up’ or ‘interact’ in a statistical quantitative sense” (p. 560). Testing intersectional research questions by looking at interactions between categories can undertheorize the processes that create the categories represented as independent variables. Put another way, treating race and gender as independent variables suggests that these social categories are primarily properties of individuals rather than reflections of macrolevel social practices linked to inequality (Weber & Parra-Medina, 2003). For example, sociologists have found meaningful differences between White and Black Americans’ experiences of being middle class. Primarily because of many years of redlining practices in mortgage lending, Black families with middle-class incomes have less than half the net worth of White families with comparable incomes (Conley, 1999); because of ongoing residential segregation, Black middle-class communities are more likely to be geographically surrounded by poor communities and to have higher rates of crime (Pattillo-McCoy, 1999). Compared to middle-class Whites, middle-class Blacks are more likely to have a sibling in poverty (Pattillo-McCoy & Heflin, 1999), and thus the poor may seem less distant than they do to members of the White middle class. For these and other reasons, the psychological experience of middle-class status may differ by race in important ways. Of course, it is possible to address some of these discrepancies by controlling for covariates in statistical models. However, to the extent that the meaning of one independent variable (e.g., class) varies depending on the level of the other independent variable (e.g., race) is neither acknowledged nor measured—that is, whether a given status is experienced in different ways depending on the other statuses held—an important aspect of intersectionality remains unaddressed and invisible. These observations suggest that the inclusion of statistical interactions among race, gender, and other social categories in multivariate analyses is not, in and of itself, sufficient to develop what Smith and Stewart (1983) called a “truly interactive model of racism and sexism” (p....
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