Review of African World History Project: The Preliminary Challenge - Chapter 10
Chapter 10 of ASCAC's African World History Project: The Preliminary Challenge is entitled "Womanism and Black Feminism: Issues in the Manipulation of African Historiography." It is an essay by Dr. Valethia Watkins that shows how this Western ideology acts to destabilize our healing process. One could make more general analyses on the destabilizing effects of Western religious and other political ideologies as a group. But by focusing finely on feminism, Watkins illustrates in minute detail how to deconstruct and thus ameliorate the subliminal influence of tactics in the Western cultural onslaught. The analysis involves ascertaining how well the ideology's rhetoric correlates with historical realities. It also involves evaluating how well the rhetoric's prescriptions for living attend to our own present and future wellbeing.
Watkins points out that black feminism is a movement with a vocal leadership but no followers. This is likely due to the common sense recognition in the African community that a family alignment based on ethnicity is meaningful for historical analysis and viable for survival, while a family alignment based on sex is not. (Biological considerations make the point about survival especially cogent.) The African community recognizes that the literal family - wife, husband and children - is a primary spiritual institution whose sanctity is essential to our physical and cultural survival. Family conflicts are inevitable, because everyone is unique and at some point every two persons will see some things differently. Survival compels us to handle internal conflicts without the exploitive influence of outsiders.
Watkins notes that the American experience shared by African women and African men belies the academic argument of a kinship between African women and American women. It was with African men that African women endured death marches from the interior to the coast of Africa. It was with African men that African women spent their last days on our homeland in the depths of dungeons. It was with African men that African women crossed the Middle Passage in the bowels of ships lying in vomit and human waste. American women did not rise up on behalf of their "sisters". They enjoyed the benefits derived from the oppression of African women. They did nothing to oppose the sexual assaults on them.
Watkins alerts us to the practice of manufacturing legitimacy by unilaterally placing African women thinkers and activists under the umbrella of black feminism. She warns, "The Black Feminist Revisionist History project, as I call this trend, involves the conscription of the aforementioned unsung intellectual history under the banner of feminism. This project balkanizes the intellectual/activist history of African women and men along gender lines." So historical women who advocated for African self-determination are today labeled "black feminists". "This list includes Sojourner Truth, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Maria W. Stewart, Harriet Tubman and Lucy C. Laney."
It is acknowledged that Western women have issues that they are obliged to address. However we in the African community must be wary of divisive feminist rhetoric and its associated assumptions creeping into our language. This is because language shapes dialog, concepts and consequential behavior. Two assumptions propagated by feminist thinking are "Men are the enemy and all men dominate all women" and "Women share a common oppression that transcends their racial, class and cultural differences." Concepts like these can lead to the following. "Acting under the assumption of the disconnection between race and gender has led African men and women to the 'comparative suffering' game. African men and women have been engaged in a dangerous, antagonistic, and adversarial debate trying to measure, quantify, and compete against each other to determine who is worse off in white America under white supremacy."
In closing Watkins states, "A major task of our historiography is to remove the ruin and rubble left in the wake of enslavement, colonialization, and the ongoing fall out of white supremacy in order to recoup and relearn our tradition. In this process we must discard those ideas that handicap, retard or even ruin the regeneration of a culturally-grounded African historiography."