Status Updates From Fighting Words: Black Women...

P1 “To be truly liberating, any social theory must reflect the actual problems of an historical conjuncture with a commitment to rigor and scholastic truth.” — Manning Marable, 1993, pg 127

P1 “Theory is no longer theoretical when it loses sight of its own conditional nature, takes no risk in speculation, and circulates as a form of administrative inquisition. Theory oppresses when it … perpetuates existing power relations, when it presents itself as a means to exert authority—the Voice of Knowledge.” — Trinh Minh-ha, 1989, pg 42

- Surviving intellectual assaults of this magnitude requires oppositional knowledges that tell Black women, if only in the simplest terms, “Don’t let anybody tell you who you are.” The fact that Black women in the United States have survived at all is proof enough for me that Black feminist thought exists.”

P1 “The fact that so many African-American women have grown to womanhood able to resist the damaging effects of stereotyping demonstrates the significance of Black feminist thought for African-American women. …

- (e.g., a patriarchal Black cultural nationalism, a racist feminism, or a raceless, genderless class analysis). In other words, theorizing from outsider-within locations can produce distinctive oppositional knowledges that embrace multiplicity yet remain cognizant of power.”

- This, to me, is what distinguishes oppositional knowledges developed in outsider-within locations both from elite knowledges (social theory developed from within centers of power such as Whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, class privilege, or citizenship) and from knowledges developed in oppositional locations where groups resist only one form of oppression -

P1 “Theorizing from outsider-within locations reflects the multiplicity of being on the margins within intersecting systems of race, class, gender, sexual, and national oppression, even as such theory remains grounded in and attentive to real differences in power. -

PART 1 “Under conditions of social injustice, the outsider-within location describes a particular knowledge/power relationship, one of gaining knowledge about or of a dominant group without gaining the full power accorded to members of that group.”

- More recently, I have deployed the term outsider-within to describe social locations or border spaces occupied by groups of unequal power. Individuals gain or lose identities as “outsiders within” by their placement in these social locations. Outsider-within spaces are riddled with contradictions.”

PART 1 “For my own survival, I chose the term outsider within to describe the location of people who no longer belong to any one group. Initially, I used the term to describe individuals who found themselves in marginal locations between groups of varying power. …

- Replacing prevailing interpretations of how we are supposed to view ourselves with oppositional perspectives that not only redefine notions of marginality but reclaim marginal locations as places of potential intellectual, political, and ethical strength seems necessary.”

PART 1 “For members of historically oppressed groups, understanding arrangements of this magnitude requires rejecting the paralyzing constraints of putative “marginality” that alternately views outsiders as grateful ambassadors or unwelcome intruders. -

PART 1 “I now see that I was searching for a location where I “belonged,” a safe intellectual and political space that I could call “home.” But how could I presume to find a home in a system that, at best, was predicated upon my alleged inferiority and, at worst, was dedicated to my removal? More important, why would I even want to?”

INTRO “We do not sweat and summon our best in order to rescue the killers; it is to comfort and to empower the possible victims of evil that we do tinker and daydream and revise and memorize and then impart all that we can of our inspired, our inherited humanity.” — June Jordan, 1992, p.29

INTRO “Unfortunately, many of us who possess the specialized language of academia often do not even try to translate what are excellent ideas into a form that makes them understood by others. I remind these readers that to read on a high level of abstraction is itself a luxury. Privatizing and hoarding ideas upholds inequality. Sharing ideas through translation and teaching supports democracy.”

- Members of these groups do in fact theorize, and our critical social theory has been central to our political empowerment and search for justice. Social theory can be used to support hierarchical power relations. However, more importantly, critical social theory can also challenge unjust ideas and practices.”

INTRO “Despite long-standing claims by elites that Blacks, women, Latinos, and other similarly derogated groups in the United States remain incapable of producing the type of interpretive, analytical thought that is labeled theory in the West, powerful knowledges of resistance that toppled former structures of social inequality repudiate this view. -

INTRO “Unfortunately, much important theoretical knowledge designed to provide understanding, illumination, and insights for effective action remains buried in the obscure, exclusionary language of academia.”

INTRO “In my view, critical social theory constitutes theorizing about the social in defense of economic and social justice. Stated differently, critical social theory encompasses bodies of knowledge and sets of institutional practices that actively grapple with the central questions facing groups of people differently placed in specific political, social, and historic contexts characterized by injustice.”

Intro: “Elites simultaneously derogate the social theory of less powerful groups who may express contrary standpoints on the same social issues by labeling subordinate groups’ social theory as being folk wisdom, raw experience, or common sense.”

Intro: “It is not that elites produce theory while everyone else produces mere thought. Rather, elites possess the power to legitimate the knowledge that they define as theory as being universal, normative, and ideal.”

- Social theories emerging from and/or on behalf of historically oppressed groups investigate ways to escape from, survive in, and/or oppose prevailing social and economic injustice.”

Introduction: “Although oppositional knowledge often takes diverse forms, in my view historically oppressed groups also produce social theories. Not only do the forms assumed by these theories—poetry, music, essays, and the like—diverge from academic theory, but the purpose of such theory also seems distinctly different. -