Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment

Chapters 3-6 of Black Feminist Thought focus on intersecting forms of oppression and Black women’s varied responses to these oppressions. The theme of Controlling Images and the Intersectional Oppression of Black Women is central to these chapters. Collins uses a multitude of examples to shed light on the nature and function of controlling images including the mammy, the matriarch, and the welfare mother. Created by the dominant class and perpetuated by a wide range of institutions, such as schools, the media, and even Black organizations, controlling images perpetuate negative stereotypes about Black women, thereby legitimizing their oppression. These negative racial stereotypes intersect with other forms of bias. The welfare mother, for instance, involves racial, gender, and class stereotypes, presenting Black women as “lazy breeders” who strain social services and pass their bad values onto their children. Collins points out that “the image of the welfare mother provides ideological justifications for intersecting oppressions of race, gender, and class” (79)—oppressive ideologies create the controlling image, which is then used to perpetuate those ideologies.  

Controlling images are contradictory and hold Black women to impossible standards, a point Collins makes in her discussion of mammy and matriarch images:

Images of the mammy and the matriarch place African-American women in an untenable position. For Black women workers in service occupations requiring long hours and/or substantial emotional labor, becoming the ideal mammy means precious time and energy spent away from husbands and children. But being employed when Black men have difficulty finding steady work exposes African-American women to the charge that Black women emasculate Black men by failing to be submissive, dependent, ‘feminine’ women (78).

Collins expands her discussion of the contradictory standards Black women face in her treatment of the welfare mother. On the one hand, welfare mothers are lazy and a burden on society. On the other hand, matriarchs work too hard, spend too much time away from their families, and emasculate Black men. Like the matriarch, the welfare mother is a “failed mammy.” However, unlike the matriarch, the welfare queen refuses to become “de mule uh de world” (45), to use the words of the Black American author Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960).

Collins discusses the history of controlling images to allow readers to trace their emergence and development. The mammy was the first controlling image of Black women in the US. As Collins notes, the image of the faithful, obedient domestic servant emerged during slavery and evolved after emancipation: “Created to justify the economic exploitation of house slaves and sustained to explain Black women’s long-standing restriction to domestic service, the mammy image represents the normative yardstick used to evaluate all Black women’s behavior” (72). Indeed, the nurturing, deferential mammy of the past continues to haunt Black women in various spaces, including at work and in public: “Mammy is the public face that whites expect Black women to assume for them” (73).

Collins traces the origins and development of the welfare mother image. The image of the lazy, unemployed ‘breeder’ emerged in the mid-20th century, as Black women in the US gained more political power and demanded equal access to government services. It evolved into the welfare queen in the 1980s to justify government cuts to social welfare. This revamped image presented Black women as an embodiment of societal decline: materialistic, domineering, and reliant on the public dole. Indeed, the welfare queen is the antithesis of the imagined traditional family ideal, which comprises a wage-earning man, a stay-at-home mother, and their biological children. As Collins notes, the traditional family ideal constructed by the white elite is heterosexual, racially homogenous, and patriarchal. Until 2015, government policy supported the traditional family by conferring legitimacy only to heterosexual marriages in some states (Chappell, Bill. “Supreme Court Declares Same-Sex Marriage Legal in All 50 States.” NPR, 26 June 2015).

Against this backdrop, Collins traces the history of Resistance to Oppression and Empowerment of Black Women. In Collins’s analysis, oppression perpetuates itself primarily through controlling images that define oppressed groups as unworthy of equality. Resistance therefore takes the form of self-definition, and Collins many works of art, scholarship, and criticism to show how Black women have worked to define themselves and their communities on their own terms. Literature played a particularly important role in Black women’s self-definition. Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is exemplary in this regard. Hurston’s main character, Nanny, resists controlling images of the “mule” and the “breeder” when she declares:

‘Ah was born back in slavery so it wasn’t for me to fulfill my dream of whut a woman ought to be an do. But nothing can’t stop you from wishin! You can’t beat nobody down so low till you can rob ‘em of they will. Ah didn’t want to be use for a work-ox and a brood-sow and Ah didn’t want mah daughter used dat way neither’ (93).

Ann Allen Shockley also challenged controlling images of Black womanhood in her 1974 novel, Loving Her. The main character, Renay, leaves her abusive husband and her lesbian lover to pursue self-definition. As Collins notes, by the end of the novel, Renay has resisted “all external definitions of herself that stem from controlling images applied to Blacks, women, and lesbians” (95). Collins cites many other examples of resistance by Black women writers, including Sherley Anne Williams, Rosa Guy, and Alice Walker. Williams’s 1986 novel, Dessa Rose, describes an enslaved woman’s empowerment after she participates in a revolt led by enslaved people, runs away, and secures her freedom (95). Similarly, the protagonist in Guy’s 1983 novel, A Measure of Time, resists controlling images after being raped by her white employer and sleeping with men for money (95). Walker’s 1976 novel, Meridian, also stresses resistance by focusing on a Black woman who creates new definitions of Black womanhood (95).

Collins presents blues music as another important site of resistance for Black women. She cites many examples to support her claim. In her 1985 song, “Four Women,” for instance, Nina Simone sings about three different kinds of controlling images: the “mule” who does manual labor, the sex worker desperate for money, and the survivor of rape. After invoking their pain, Simone introduces Peaches, a powerful fourth women who expresses anger at racial oppression: “I’m awfully bitter these days […] because my parents were slaves” (113). These lyrics capture Peaches’s growing understanding of oppression and her move toward self-definition. As Collins argues, this journey mirrors that of Black women, who “journey toward an understanding of how [their] personal lives have been fundamentally shaped by intersecting oppressions of race, gender, sexuality and class. Peaches’s statement […] illustrates this transformation” (114).

Collins draws on examples from literature and music to demonstrate how Black women resisted white standards of beauty. Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel, The Bluest Eye is central to her discussion. The novel features a dark-skinned woman named Frieda, who wonders why her light-skinned friend, Maureen, gets more love and attention from adults and boys. Frieda tries not to blame Maureen for the benefits her light skin and long hair afford her. She comes to realize that the danger comes not from Maureen herself, but from the “Thing” that establishes what is beautiful (92). Gwendolyn Brooks also explored white standards of beauty in her 1953 novel, Maud Martha, which describes a dark-skinned woman’s anger with the red-headed Black woman her husband finds attractive:

‘It’s my color that makes him mad […] What I am inside, what is really me, he likes okay. But he keeps looking at my color, which is like a wall. He has to jump over it in order to meet and touch what I’ve got for him. He has to jump away up high in order to see it. He gets awful tired of all that jumping’ (92).

Unlike Morrison and Brooks, who recognized that white standards of beauty were harmful to Black women, Sara Martin rejected the standards entirely in her 1929 blues song, “Mean, Tight Mama”: “Now my hair is nappy and I don’t wear no clothes of silk. Now my hair is nappy and I don’t wear no clothes of silk. But the cow that’s black and ugly has often got the sweetest milk” (107). Each of these women found a way to name and oppose the oppressive beauty standards that the dominant ideology had presented as natural.

In addition to literature and music, Collins draws on academic studies to support her arguments about Black women’s oppression. For example, in Chapter 4, she cites statistics to counter the image of the Black matriarch, which blames single mothers for their children’s bad behavior, including poor academic performance and criminality. As Collins observes, blaming single mothers ignores the culpability of the criminal justice system, an argument borne out by statistics: “African-Americans are almost eight times more likely to be imprisoned than Whites, a social policy that leaves far fewer men for Black women to marry than the proportion of White men available to White women” (77). Collins also cites statistics in her discussion of sexual violence in Chapter 6:

Black women are more likely to be victimized than White women, Black women are less likely to report their rapes, less likely to have their trials result in convictions, and, most disturbingly, less likely to seek counseling and other support services (147).

The dialectical relationship between oppression and resistance is by no means confined to the past. In Chapter 3, for example, Collins highlights continuities between past and present in Black women’s labor. During slavery, Black women worked as domestic workers and in agriculture for no pay. After emancipation, they worked as live-in domestics for low wages. Domestic day-work became the norm in the early 20th century, after Black people migrated to urban centers. In the second half of the 20th century, Black women entered the growing service industry. Low pay (or no pay) characterizes Black women’s labor in all these periods. As Collins notes, moreover, the tasks Black women perform have remained remarkably consistent:

The work performed by employed poor Black women resembles duties long associated with domestic work. During prior eras, domestic service was confined to private households. In contrast, contemporary cooking, cleaning, nursing, and child care have been routinized and decentralized in an array of fast-food restaurants, cleaning services, day-care centers, and service establishments. Black women perform similar work, but in different settings (62).

Collins draws similar parallels between the past and present in her discussion of Black women’s bodies and sexuality. In the US, the objectification of Black women began during slavery, when Black women were displayed before white men at auctions. Although slavery ended with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865, the objectification of Black women continues, especially in sex work, such as pornography. The voyeurism inherent in pornography, for example, recalls the voyeurism of enslavers at auctions, as well as other voyeuristic practices, such as 19th-century “freakshows.” Collins uses the example Sarah Baartman—born around 1789 as a member of the Khoikhoi ethnic group in what is now South Africa—to underscore the connection between “freakshows,” slave auctions, and pornography. A white surgeon convinced Baartman to travel to London, where she was known as the “Hottentot Venus” and displayed in revealing garments to white audiences. She was later taken to France, where she was exhibited publicly and at wealthy people’s private parties. After her death in 1815, Baartman’s body was dissected, and her buttocks and genitals were put on display (137). The objectification of Baartman continues to this day with the use of her image in academic lectures. Some scholars prepare audiences before showing Baartman’s image, while others leave her image on their screens and allow audiences “a lengthy, voyeuristic peek” at her body (142). Collins urges readers to speak up against the continued commodification of Black women’s bodies. She models this behavior twice in Chapter 6. In one instance, she questions a prominent white male scholar for his “pornographic use” of an image of Baartman. In another instance, she critiques a Black male scholar for failing to address gender in his lecture on the 19th-century “raced” body, which featured an image of Baartman. These scholars’ reactions underscore the continued need for Black feminist thought. The Black scholar dismissed Collins’s concerns, while the white scholar “defended his ‘right’ to use public domain material in any way he saw fit, even if it routinely offended Black women and contributed to their continued objectification” (142). By highlighting Baartman’s story, Collins shows how the objectification and sexualization of Black women’s bodies—which dates back to the beginnings of slavery and European colonialism in Africa—continues to this day and occurs even under the guise of scholarship.