Do We Need Feminism in 2011?

Yes, says noted feminist scholar Beverly Guy-Sheftall. From young American girls writing rappers to protest lyrics about bitches and hos, to the women standing up in Egypt, Libya and Ivory Coast, feminism is indeed alive, well -- and needed -- in the 21st century.

Do We Need Feminism in 2011?
by Beverly Guy-Sheftall | The Root.com

As part of Women's History Month, The Root is exploring the role that feminism plays in African-American lives, from its role in hip-hop to black men embracing the term to radical women who waged war against oppression over the years. We asked noted scholar Beverly Guy-Sheftall, the former president of the National Women's Studies Association and a pioneer in black feminism, to weigh in on where she sees the movement heading today. Here are her thoughts.

As we celebrate Women's History Month this March, it is important to reflect upon the continuing struggle of women around the globe to live better lives -- in peace and with justice. Given the horrific circumstances facing our sisters and brothers over the past weeks in Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt, Ivory Coast and now Libya, it is imperative that we envision a world in which every one of us is free from the ravages of poverty, greed, discrimination, war and authoritarian regimes.

It is my black feminist politics that propels me always to think deeply about the human condition: global realities, especially as they affect people of color, women and children; and the urgency of our need to eliminate racism, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, religious intolerance, xenophobia and all other oppressions that plague humans wherever they live.

Despite the importance of the politics of feminism and all of the ways in which it addresses oppression of all varieties, I still find myself having to defend my allegiances to the goals of women's movements around the world. I am still challenged about my self-identification as a black feminist. So I want to say what I mean when I use this term.

For me the label "black feminist" enables me to make visible the emancipatory vision and acts of resistance among women who articulate their understanding of the complex nature of black womanhood (in all its diversity); the interlocking nature of the oppressions we suffer; and the necessity of sustained struggle in our quest for self-determination, the liberation of black people and gender equality. It encourages me to express solidarity with other women and people of color engaged in local and global struggles for emancipation.

As I ponder the future of black feminism in the U.S., this is what I see: It is imperative that we find ways to convince black communities -- especially black youths -- that, in the words of bell hooks, "feminism is for everybody." What this means is that we must develop an abhorrence for violence against women and girls and declare a moratorium on rape.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root.com

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Beverly Guy-Sheftall is the founder and director of the Women's Research & Resource Center at Spelman College, where she is also the Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women's Studies. She has edited or co-edited Who Should Be First? Feminists Speak Out on the 2008 Presidential Election; Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women's Studies; and Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. She is also co-founder of SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women.

Book Review: Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism

special to New Black Man



Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism

Louisiana State University Press, 2007.

by David Ikard



Review by Kinohi Nishikawa



A pivotal moment in James Baldwin’s novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) sees the churchman and patriarch Gabriel being confronted by his sister Florence over a devastating past infidelity. Upon fathering a child with his mistress Esther, Gabriel stole the savings of his first wife Deborah and gave it to Esther to hush up the matter. Deborah wrote a letter to Florence testifying to Gabriel’s ruinous behavior, which left her neglected, isolated, and economically dependent on him. When Florence musters up the courage to confront Gabriel, ten years after having received the letter, the effect on his psyche is profound: “It had lived in [Deborah’s] silence, then, all of those years? He could not believe it…And yet, this letter, her witness, spoke, breaking her long silence, now that she was beyond his reach forever” (212). Confronted with the suffering wrought by his patriarchal authority, Gabriel reels from the memory of Deborah as it is framed by Florence’s criticism of his actions. As if to underscore the power of speech in these women’s intertwined voices, Baldwin has Florence rebut Gabriel’s power over her by uttering, “When I go, brother, you better tremble, cause I ain’t going to go in silence” (215).



In Breaking the Silence David Ikard references Florence’s incitement to speak out against Gabriel’s power as a means of “expos[ing] and explod[ing] the victim status upon which black patriarchy is premised” (4). Following the example set by Michael Awkward’s black male feminist literary criticism, in which “critical perspective, not gender [identity], [is] the measuring stick of a black feminist methodology” (29), Ikard presents readings of Go Tell It on the Mountain and five other twentieth-century African American fictional works that stake out new terrain in thinking about black gender relations. Unlike Awkward’s body of criticism, however, Ikard is interested in parsing discourses of race and gender in not only black women’s writing (Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara) but also black men’s writing (Chester Himes, Baldwin, Walter Mosley). Broadening the scope of black male feminist literary criticism to include works by men addresses a lacuna in Awkward’s thought: the notion that “only black women deal with issues of gender” in literary fiction (29). Ikard wants to show how black men too have advanced complex responses to patriarchy, sexism, and homophobia as these bear on so-called “race matters.” In this way, Breaking the Silence sketches a new direction for black male feminist critique. By staging an intergender dialogue about black gender relations, Ikard suggests that the discursive silence surrounding African American patriarchy must be undone by men and women alike.



One of the interpretive consequences of Ikard’s focus on black male literary texts is that he is able to deconstruct the ideology of black male victimization “from within.” In his analysis of Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), Ikard understands the protagonist Bob Jones as someone whose sense of racial oppression is decidedly gendered. Ikard’s argument is that Jones’s desire for different female characters indexes his struggle to overcome racism through a calculus of patriarchal privilege: “The tension between Jones’s need to be nurtured by black women and his desire to be recognized as a dominant patriarch contributes to his ‘crisis’ of masculine identity” (33). When Jones intuits that his needs are not being met by a black woman, Ella Mae, he pursues a near-white woman, Alice, in order to increase his social capital among whites. Yet when Alice attempts to pass in white society on her own terms, without Jones in tow, her behavior is read as a betrayal of the race. Drawing from Deborah King’s inquiry into the “monism” of black male political posturing, Ikard reads Jones’s relationships with Ella Mae and Alice as a reinscription of “phallocentric notions of power and control,” whereby “Black male oppression…masquerades as the oppression of all black people” (46, 40). Ikard begins here, with Himes’s sympathetic portrait of Jones, in order to foreground the harms done to black women in the name of racial resistance. By attending to female voices in Himes’s text which were largely ignored by previous critics, Ikard highlights the limited political vision of discourses of black male victimization.



In subsequent chapters of Breaking the Silence, Ikard is concerned to illuminate how authors since the male-dominated “protest school” of the 1940s have rendered the crisis of black masculinity in arguably more critical ways. Ikard’s chapter on Go Tell It on the Mountain is exemplary in this regard because it introduces the idea that both men and women have a stake in black patriarchy—a dynamic that underscores the need for genuine intergender dialogue (rather than, say, a feminist critique of male oppression as “only” an issue of men dominating women). On the one hand, Ikard shows how the novel’s patriarch, Gabriel, consistently shores up his sense of masculine identity by compelling the black women in his life to submit to his religious and familial authority. When his mistress Esther is left on her own with their unborn child, she is “virtually at Gabriel’s mercy” because she is a “poor pregnant woman of disreputable social standing” (64). Esther might reveal Gabriel’s infidelity to the church, but Ikard understands this as an impossible choice, given the practices of community policing which downplay such infidelity in the name of securing strong black male leaders. In this way, Gabriel’s sense of himself as “the chief victim of white oppression and the burden-bearer of his family” continues to justify his ill treatment of black women.



Yet in his chapter on Baldwin, Ikard is also keen to show how the novel “disrupts the victimization discourse that allows black men like Jones and Gabriel to explain away their subjection of black women” (50). Crucial to this narrative disruption, according to Ikard, is black women’s recognition of and rebellion against their complicity with black patriarchy. In the figures of Elizabeth (Gabriel’s current wife) and Gabriel’s mother, Ikard identifies how “women unknowingly support patriarchy in their relationships with men,” particularly through the “internalized…expectation of black female self-sacrifice” (50, 67). Elizabeth buttresses Gabriel’s authority by assuming guilt for being a “bad mother” and having had sex prior to their marriage. Gabriel’s mother is a more resonant example of black female patriarchy in that she “rears him to believe that as a man he should expect black women to cater to his every emotional, physical, and material desire” (55). In both cases, Ikard outlines a convincing case to extend the study of black patriarchy to women who support its ideological and institutional viability. Importantly, this perspective does not cast judgment on black women for supporting patriarchy but instead seeks to understand 1) how their stake in it is conditioned by white supremacy, and 2) how a more inclusive politics of resistance would overturn both racists and gendered structures of oppression. Ikard’s perspective is echoed in the character of Florence, who emerges as the novel’s privileged witness to the range of patriarchy’s harms precisely because she has also suffered from black women’s (her mother’s) investment in patriarchy.



The idea of complicity organizes Ikard’s readings of works by Morrison, Bambara, and Mosley. As Baldwin does with Gabriel’s mother, these authors represent black men and women who draw from victimizing discourses in order to justify violent and impoverishing acts of community policing. Among these interpretations, Ikard’s treatment of Mosley’s Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1997) and Walkin’ the Dog (1999) is especially notable, given the fact that Mosley is rarely, if ever, mentioned in black feminist discourse. Yet in these two works from Mosley’s Socrates Fortlow cycle, Ikard brings his analysis full circle to identify ways in which black men reflexively deconstruct their investment in patriarchy and white supremacy. Socrates’s hardened criminal past informs his ability to mentor young urban black men who are trapped, Mosley wagers, between poverty and a racist criminal-justice system, on the one hand, and a community discourse of perpetual victimization, on the other. In his bravura readings from the Socrates cycle, Ikard shows how black men suffer from an “implosive victimization,” whereby “rage and despair are systematically turned against the victimized” (142). Like Florence, Socrates emerges as a voice warning against the internalization of racist and patriarchal ideals as a matter of securing short-term, small-scale privileges. That Socrates counsels mainly young men in these works illuminates Ikard’s point that intragender dialogue about resisting racism and patriarchy is not only productive for black gender relations but a way for black men to reclaim social agency over and against victimizing discourses.



It may well be Ikard’s identification as a black male feminist—a necessarily identity-transitive critical perspective—that allows him to analyze black complicity with racism and patriarchy in such a compelling fashion. Ikard’s critical voice allies itself with characters—both men and women—in the African American literary tradition that have challenged black patriarchy (and its concomitant dependency on white supremacy) from within. His Breaking the Silence exemplifies the spirit of a black male feminist criticism whose power comes from a mediating critical perspective rather than an essential gender identity. The inter- and intragender insights the book presents through African American fiction pave the way for a more robust practice of studying race and gender relations through literary interpretation. More broadly, in divesting black patriarchy of its ideological coherence—its harmful and self-replicating victimization (which often takes place through and at the expense of black women)—Ikard challenges African Americans to reconceptualize their social identities around new racial and gender possibilities.

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Kinohi Nishikawa is a Ph.D. candidate in the Programs in Literature and Women’s Studies at Duke University. His dissertation analyzes the pulp fiction of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines in the context of the black urban experience during the civil rights and Black Power movements.

Book Review: Ain't I a Feminist?: African American Men Speak Out on Fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedom

special to NewBlackMan

Ain’t I a Feminist?:
African American Men Speak Out on Fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedom
by Aaronette White
(State University of New York Press, 2008)
Reviewed by Chantel K. Liggett

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In Ain’t I a Feminist, Aaronette White proves that progressive feminist thought and action is not foreign to present-day African American men. Even more important, however, is the way in which she helps to “demystify the process” leading these men to, and sustaining their investments in, various forms of lived feminism (199). While brilliantly organizing the narratives of the twenty self-identified feminist, profeminist, or anti-sexist men she studied into seven thematic chapters, providing helpful contextualizations and frameworks within which to understand their experiences, the evaluation she does is so fluid and congruent with the men’s experiences, it undeniably gives their words and thought processes precedence over any theory or analysis thereof. As she puts it, “how men learn to confront patriarchy and become feminists can be understood through the narratives of those who are living the experience”(193). In permitting her subjects to lead by example, White provides what can be thought of as a blueprint for the cultivation of black male feminism.

The key ingredients of lived black male feminism are “humility, emotional openness, empathy, nurturing, dialog, accountability, mutuality, power sharing, and nonviolence,” offers White, focusing on the way feminist values are internalized and continually practiced on a day-to-day basis by the men in her study (199). Beyond questioning societal structures and practices like marriage, monogamy, religion, Black Power nationalist movements, violence, workplace gender dynamics, female domesticity, homophobia/heterosexism, and authoritative or removed fatherhood, these men reflect critically on their humanity, personal development, and relationships; White centers these processes as providing a wealth of knowledge about the implementation of feminist thought. Quoting James Baldwin as saying, “Not only was I not born to be a slave: I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave-master,” she points to the importance of feminist men striving to occupy social positions more meaningful than those of dominators (59).

More than once White uses the phrase “vigilant practices” to describe the behavioral work of feminist men. Giving credit where credit is due, she does not overlook negative bouts in the men’s feminist development, which she calls “contamination” experiences, and outlines the difficultly with which men maintain feminist lifestyles. As one of her participants says, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing one has “already made it” as a feminist, when feminism is really a continual process of revaluation and renewal (122). Another participant offers that Black male feminists also sometimes (accidentally or purposely) revert to the “male thing” (104). Elaborating on this, White states, “Feminist Black men’s use of male dominant behaviors can be subtle, unconscious, and used as a coping device when they feel threatened” (101). Given that feminism requires a radical resocialization of males, she stresses that male feminists need not be flawless, and that it would be unrealistic to expect them to. “Egalitarianism requires not perfection but effort mixed with humility,” she says, demonstrating the importance of willingness in feminist development (96). A large portion of such willingness takes the form of speaking about, listening to, and being perceptive of both ‘larger’ issues and everyday occurrences regarding gender; what White chronicles the power of in Ain’t I a Feminist is the recurrence of such seemingly simply acts. Furthermore, in “directing attention to these practices,” White “counters the popular tendency to view a person’s gender identity as fixed or as developed primarily through childhood socialization,” instead naming it an ongoing, conscious process that individuals have a large degree of control over(84).

Aaronette White further commits to detailing and addressing the patterns of specific environments and resources that have had the biggest influence on her subjects’ feminist development. Demonstrating that becoming a feminist is not something one does alone, White seeks to pinpoint what has led these men in that direction, coming to the solid conclusion that intimate friendships or romances with feminist women and institutional settings that support feminist thinking are the key portals through which they gain access and further their development. Speaking of the importance of his romantic and sexual attraction to a feminist woman in aiding his feminist development, one subject says, “I don’t believe many men will put much effort into trying to correct themselves if the person who is trying to correct them is not someone who they are committed to and who is important to them” (89). As White highlights, many of the men in her study posited feminist-thinking women as strong, firm, and challenging, prompting, if not forcing, them to reevaluate patriarchal beliefs and practices. In this way, White emphasizes the importance of female feminist thinkers opening up to and working with men, and vice versa, as opposed to having separatist movements. Friendships with feminist women offer men “insider perspectives” (112), she says, and such relationships frequently provide “constructive criticism,” “practicing ground,” “safe spaces” for feminist growth (116). Furthermore, simply being around other feminists helped her subjects legitimate or free their potential male feminist identities, in providing a “mutually understood and shared relational reality that affirms another’s identity” (121).

The men’s reliance on institutional encouragement and support of feminist thought is most evident in Chapter Four, titled “Turning Points,” in which White charts the men’s substantial shifts in their thoughts about or relationship to feminism. “Their exposure to open-minded and radical, social justice-oriented institutions,” most often universities, “and their active participation to support racial and economic injustice often provided the foundation for subsequent feminist views and practices,” she observes (87). White utilizes these findings by challenging black feminists and their communities to recreate such environments where they are lacking, to facilitate the development of feminist consciousnesses in willing boys and men who would not otherwise have access. She boldly recommends the development women’s studies curricula in elementary and high schools and calls for a multiplicity of community campaigns that would allow black men to develop feminist consciousness in settings closer to home, providing her readers a lasting challenge.

Notably, aside from chronicling the paths of twenty black men to feminism, White’s groundbreaking work demonstrates effortlessly that “when one is pressured to view one’s humanity in terms of ‘being a man’ or ‘being a woman,’ what it means to be human is lost, truncated, stereotyped, and taken less seriously” (120). What these men gain from their commitment to feminism is indefinable but shines through their stories, impossible to ignore. In giving public voice to these men in the way she has, White sets forth a compelling model for other present-day as well as future men to grab on to.

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Chantel K. Liggett is an undergraduate at Duke University pursuing a Women's Studies Major and Study of Sexualities Certificate. She is currently conducting research on 'queer' resistance to concrete categories of identity by Dutch nationals and Surinamese migrants in Amsterdam