EditorialSource: Signs, Vol. 14, No. 4, Common Grounds and Crossroads: Race, Ethnicity, and Class inWomen's Lives (Summer, 1989), pp. 739-743Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174682 .

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EDITORIAL

The articles in this issue show the power of theories by and from the perspectives of feminists of Color to explain how women's lives are shaped by relations of gender, race, class, and ethnicity. This theoretical work grows from traditions that precede the second wave of feminism and builds from the funds of cultural experience in America's racial/ethnic communities a scholarship that at once resists oppression and validates the experiences of women of Color. Women of Color have been the leading proponents of both a sisterhood that is self-conscious about its diversity and a feminist theory that examines the interrelations of race, class, and gender in women's lives. Elsa Barkley Brown (refering to Bettina Aptheker's image of "pivoting the center") suggests that we learn to analyze the experiences of women in terms appropriate to their realities and not resort to comparisons that define those experiences with refer- ence to a center, which, in feminist theory, has been the privileged terrain of white and middle-class women.

Both explicitly and implicitly these papers expose and critique the ways in which the lives of women of Color have been analyzed from white and middle-class-and sometimes also male-perspectives. They show how very different the situation looks when analyzed from the perspectives of the subjects themselves. The essays also take on the question that follows from that effort: What do we make of women's different experiences and perspectives on power and oppression? Rec- ognition of difference as an end in itself can objectify those designated as "different," disengage analysts from the consequences of such anal- ysis, and depoliticize relations of power, hardly goals of feminist schol- arship.

For instance, Jacquelyn Hall challenges the ways that feminist historical interpretations about white working-class women have been shaped by a specific focus on women factory workers in big Northeastern cities. Yet, even as she tries to balance history by including the very different experiences of southern white and Black women, she warns us-echoing Barkley Brown-against "seeking some new centered structure" on the basis of the merely partial truths our scholarship reveals. She calls for a historical (and

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we would add theoretical) practice that is "self-conscious about perspective, that releases multiple voices . . . and that, above all, 'nurtures an internally differing but united political community'" (908).

Darlene Clark Hine argues that most approaches to the study of the Black northern migration or to the study of Black women's political organization fail to appreciate how rape and the threat of rape constituted a compelling motivation for Black women's ac- tions. She argues that Black women resisted in two ways, by migrating and by developing what Hine calls a "culture of dissem- blance," manifested in literature and in their political organiza- tions, by which they shielded themselves from the realities of physical and economic violence in their lives.

The articles by Susan Mann and Hill Gates provide critiques of white, Western feminist theories of patriarchy as a unitary concept. Mann focuses on Black women's experiences in the transition from slavery to sharecropping. She argues that although the public and private domains of work became more differentiated, and a sexual division of labor in the home became more marked, the position of freedwomen nevertheless improved. Gates focuses on women in China and on the relationship of women's labor to what she calls a petty capitalist mode of production, but which has often been interpreted as a generic variety of patriarchy.

In the viewpoint section, Patricia Hill Collins and Maxine Baca Zinn provide the sharpest critiques of the racism and sexism that pervade dominant cultural interpretations of women of Color in their analyses of renewed stereotyping of Black families on televi- sion and in public policy research. Bill Moyers is one direct link between the old stereotyping and the new. Behind the scenes in 1965, it was he who urged President Johnson to use what would come to be known as the Moynihan Report as the basis for the president's commencement address at Howard University.' That policy report, which created a derogatory picture of African- American families in general and Black women in particular, was resurrected twenty-one years later by Moyers's television special, "The Vanishing Family: Crisis in Black America." Collins and Baca Zinn argue that Moyers's labeling of Black individual and family behavior as dysfunctional and pathological amounts to a revival of "blaming the victim," in this case, Black women, and an attempt to turn Black women and men against each other while ignoring the obvious causes of poverty, namely, joblessness and cutbacks of public social support programs.

'Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Faimily and Nation (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 30.

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Summer 1989 / SIGNS

By itself then, recognition of difference can lead to a kind of cultural relativism, one that separates rather than unifies, along the lines of, "well, that's just how those women are." Such approaches often end up as little more than justifications of the status quo. So, the question facing feminist theorists is "How do we proceed once we begin to understand the race and class specificity of the complex power relations that structure our lives as women?" What unifies the essays herein is that they demonstrate in a variety of ways how analyses and strategies stemming from the specific experiences of African-American, Latina, and Asian women enrich the theory and political practice of all of us. Aida Hurtado, for example, introduces the concept of "relational position"-that the significant compari- son of Black and white women should not be of their relative standing to one another or to men of their race/ethnicity but, rather, how each stands relative to white men-in order to explore both racial/ethnic differences and to see how these can be bases for women's unified resistance to oppression in all its forms.

Elsa Barkley Brown describes the way she teaches her students about African-American culture, using the metaphor of quilts to teach simultaneously about and from the perspectives of that culture. She points out the inherent contradiction of telling stu- dents about African-American cultural values but doing so in a standard classroom manner that contradicts the entire subject matter. The points she highlights-about the importance of the individual, about the mutually reinforcing and noncontradictory relationship between individual and group, and about responsibil- ity for oneself as a part of a group-she demonstrates in some very difficult and creative classroom pedagogy. Her thesis is that you cannot convince students of the validity of values that are directly contradictory to dominant ones unless students experience that validity somehow for themselves. Both her teaching style and the cultural values she delineates are valuable resources for feminists of all colors and amplify on a point Bonnie Dill made a decade ago in Signs, that understanding the "dialectics of black womanhood" offers the possibility of "a new definition of femininity for all American women.""

Patricia Hill Collins, in her essay "The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought," outlines the contours of an alternative epistemology used by Black women that differs from the ways knowledge is produced and validated by the dominant culture. Derived from both Afrocentric and feminist standpoints, this alter- native epistemology has the potential to challenge the "content of

2Bonnie Thornton Dill, "The Dialectics of Black Womanhood," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4, no. 3 (Spring 1979): 543-55.

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what currently passes as truth . . . [and] the process of arriving at that truth" (773). In other words, she argues that race- and class- differentiated experience informs both meaning and the ways women come to know their social and political worlds. Collins's argument contextualizes Barkley Brown's creative pedagogical efforts to teach African-American women's history in a way that also validates the non-linear, non-symmetrical polyrhythmic structure and content of African-American women's consciousness (926). In other words, it is not enough just to teach about African-American women; rather, we must attempt to teach (or by extension, write, do research) in ways that affirm the ways of knowing that emerge from the culture of African-American women.

Charles Payne's tribute to Ella Baker resonates with Barkley Brown's discussion of the values and definition of self in African- American culture. Payne takes an Afrocentric perspective on the importance of Ella Baker's insistence, persistence, and skill in building local leadership, in validating women's leadership, in "person-centered organizing," and in educating and empowering individuals for the Black freedom movement. Much of the success of the Black freedom movement in the fifties and sixties stemmed from its willingness and ability to build from this perspective and- encouraged mightily by Ella Baker-to validate and build on the skills of ordinary Black women who were central to its creation. Through Baker, some of these politics became central to white feminism, and some pioneers of the second wave learned them directly from her, as well as indirectly from working in the civil rights movement. In this, her influence is incalculable. To honor her, we have created a special category, called "Tribute," for an extraordinary, ordinary woman.

Payne locates Ella Baker's politics and philosophy in the respect and reciprocity of the "family socialism" she experienced in the African-American culture of her early years. Collins argues that Black women's ways of knowing stem in part from everyday Afrocentric traditions, but they also represent an independent Black women's standpoint "about the meaning of oppression and the actions that Black women can and should take to resist it" (746). Collins stresses the centrality of concrete experience, the use of dialogue, an ethic of caring, and an ethic of personal accountability to a Black woman's standpoint. In so doing, she outlines the theoretical grounding for the links Payne makes between Ella Baker's politics and the daily lives of African-American women- links upon which Baker consciously built.

Payne's narrative style, with its stress on concrete illustrations of the empowerment of ordinary folk, as well as his focus on Baker's

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demand for caring, personal accountability, and interactive style, illustrate both Collins's and Barkley Brown's points about Afrocen- tric contributions to Black feminist epistemology. Taken together, these three papers demonstrate confluences of Afrocentric and Black feminist epistemological standpoints. For all three authors, experience, dialogue, caring, empathy, and a sense of each individ- ual's personal accountability emerge forcefully and are central to the politics of collective empowerment. With their insights in mind, then, Signs offers readers this special issue as an enriching and empowering contribution to our collective politics.

Special Issue Editors

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