This article explained all aspects of the Black Women’s Educational Alliance and brought to my attention the main points and important points that were needed to grasp in order to get the full message of what the alliance stands for. The author, Lisa L. Richardson of this source is highly reputable, she is the president of the Black Women’s Educational Alliance and has been since 2012. This source is relevant to my topic because it demonstrates how in our present society there are now
The associations that gave credence to Bethune such as Dorothy Sterling, Bernice Poole, and Darlene Hine, and Jeanetta Welch Brown. The book carries on a century long conversation about Black women’s social, political, and academic activism. In addition to the policy change, Bethune systematically worked to shatter the sexual exploitation of Black women.(p.23) The instability within the social framework ,according to Bethune would be the cause of inadequate governmental representation for the Negro.
An intersectional examination of the challenges of African Americans reveals that there are various factors that aide in the oppression of this group. Race, gender, and sexuality are all interlocking aspects to the challenges face by Black men and women. Three scholarly pieces that examine these interconnected issues and the affect that they have are “The Combahee River Collective Statement”, Black Sexual Politics by Patricia Hill Collins, and “Hip-Hop Feminist” by Joan Morgan. Each of these text argue for an understanding of Black people, and specifically Black women, in a manner that does not put race before gender and sexuality. While “The Combahee River Collective Statement” and Black Sexual Politics both seek to examine gender and sexuality
Power is something that everyone seeks to find throughout there life. Everyone wants to feel that they made their mark on this earth the way they wanted to. Being able to discover oneself throughout the world that is filled with negativity and people fighting against your specific purpose is never easy. This is the hardest for black women and their community as a whole. Throughout this book Jill shows us the daily struggles black women face and the things she personally has to deal with daily.
In this week’s reading, I connected the Ms. Article “Abstinence Isn’t Enough,” and the Feminist Theory Reader, “Defining Black Feminist Thought” in which I observed different perspectives of different feminist injustice both arguing that such social issues cannot be define in a macro-perspective. Therefore, interpreting my knowledge on the different issues presented in both these articles. In “Abstinence Isn’t Enough,” they introduced the issue that in 2011 President Bush funded 1.3 billion dollars for sex education only. Then the article states that President Obama funded 178 million dollars towards teen pregnancy prevention programs. Now, while both actions seem reasonable, according to the article, President Obama’s action is more
Molly Redden explains how black women are prone to have the deadly disease which called breast cancer. Redden claims black women are more likely to get breast cancer than white women. However, stressing this health issue on black women, Redden writes why black women on a rise now than white women. Black women are catching up with with white women as death rate slowly increase. Redden tells us how the most common factor among in black women are "socioeconomic status," "obesity," "physical activity," and "health conditions."
Brittany Lewis is the New Miss Black America Last August 26, 2017, Miss Black America 2016, Nicole Lyn Hibbert, crowned her successor and new winner of Miss Black America 2017, Brittany Lewis. Lewis graduated with a degree in broadcast, telecommunications, and mass media from the Temple University and took African-American studies. She was a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority as well as the National Council of Negro Women while she was an undergrad. At the moment, she is a third-year PhD student at George Washington University.
Black Studies (also called African and African-American studies, Africana and Pan-African studies, and African diaspora studies) is a call for action. It is a radical movement geared at rescinding ties with the white supremacist ideologies that govern our society. Emerging on campuses through the Black Power protests in the 1960’s, where students demanded an education that was relevant to their specific history of racial oppression, Black Studies is a path leading to the understanding and endearment of the culture and background of the Black diaspora that has been ignored for so long. The focus of Black Studies is to critically examine what it means to be of African descent in a world where unequal power and racial discrimination originated
History helps us learn who we are, but when we don’t know our history, our power and dreams are immediately diminished. In regards to the previous month of February and the present, March, a special celebration of the impact African American women have had on American history is very important. African American women and their accomplishments and bravery are often overlooked in mainstream history. In the months of March and especially February, Black women are often times left out of the conversation of innovation and history. During the civil rights movement many important leaders such as Dr. King and current congressman John Lewis were recognized, but not the women who actually started the bus boycotts in Montgomery and organizations located in the historical West End neighborhood that focused on denouncing the negative African American stigmas in society.
In 1974 Shirley Chisholm was picked to be the keynote speaker at a national conference for black women at the University of Missouri. In her speech "The Black Woman in Contemporary America" Chisholm expresses to her audience that black women are not interested in being addressed as "Ms." or in gaining more control over things than males, but rather African American women's top priority is the well-being of their families and communities. Being that this speech was giving during the era of the Civil Rights movement, Chisholm criticized white feminist. While she went into depth of how important it is for black and white women to unite around issues such as equal treatment, women's rights, and better job opportunities. The main focus of this speech
Historically, black women do not conform to the dominant discourse in education, similarly, Gilroy argues that black struggles for educational opportunities are a ‘resistance to domination’. Despite Hortense’s previous education in Jamaica, she is considered inferior in London, due to the fact she cannot prosper or obtain a job due to the racial attitudes which were prevalent in 1950’s
As black women always conform under patriarchal principles, women are generally silenced and deprived of rights because men are entitled to control everything. Women are silenced in a way that they lose their confidence and hesitate to speak up due to the norms present in the society they live in. Hence, even if women have the confidence to try to speak, men wouldn’t bother to listen since men ought to believe that they are superior to women. In addition to that, women often live in a life cycle of repetitions due to patriarchal principles since women are established to fulfill the roles the society had given them. It is evidenced by Celie as she struggles to survive and to define oneself apart from the controlling, manipulative, and abusive men in her life.
Black feminists wanted to form a separate entity that would keep them united and would help them to struggle with sexual, racial and economic injustice (Smith, 2000). That is why, in 1973, they created the National Black Feminist Organization. Its aim was to fight against sexism and racism experienced by African American women. More importantly, black feminists wanted to create their political agenda that was supposed to address their needs, and, as a result, it would constitute a form of a dialogue with white women. Apart from that, some of the Black feminists supported other groups such as the Black Panthers or Black Nationalism aiming at the equality in education, civil rights and employment.
The sociological impact Collins have made in sociology is to oppose oppression, racism, search for justice for black women, and enhance our theories to understand the current system/social world. According to Higginbotham (2012), in the 1970s and 1980s, black feminists were struggling—if white people studied people of color it was readily viewed as scholarship compared to people of color who studied in this field. During this time, they felt isolated, had trouble finding academy positions, and faced barriers of promotion. However, Collins early work: Black Feminist Thought opened new doors and influenced young scholars to expand their works. Many scholars tried to eliminate myths about Black women, identify their contributions to the community,
This means the white discourse in community colleges can only decide what is important or what is not important for the students to learn. This caused the racial and ethnic groups to doubt themselves as “human” because the white faculty was considering that their racial experience was not either accountable or recognized into the academics. Furthermore, this also caused some of the women to not understand about their exclusion of the male dominant discourse. In the essay,” Claiming an Education”, Rich explains how the women were being treated by the male discourse in community college, where the male college professors has doubted women for being responsible in their academics, but instead seeing them as sex objects.
