Race and Difference

Race heralds the promise of liberalism: it represents a historical exclusion in the democratic pledge of “equality and justice for all.” It marks where democracy&s;s universal form of abstract citizenship has failed to live up to its stated ideals. The failures of liberalism&s;s universalism endlessly repeat and persist, with racial inequality as the unrelenting proof, for some, of the need for more liberalism, diversity, inclusion, and voice as well as, for others, of liberalism&s;s fatal and unsurpassable flaws. Black Feminism claims for itself its own standpoint, shaped by Black women&s;s experience of oppression, slavery, exclusion, and discrimination even within feminism itself. Yet, other Black feminists and feminists of color have not always agreed that claiming a viewpoint belonging to their experience as Black is a good political strategy, given that racial categories were originally conferred by a colonialist and imperialist drive for population control, extraction, and market expansion. This perspective eschews the idea of authentic self-representation of Black experience and appeals instead to the idea of the Black woman as a disruption in the text of White self-legitimation and knowledge. Writers addressed in this chapter include Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Toni Cade Bambara, the Combahee River Collective, Hortense Spillers, Audre Lorde, Linda Alcoff, Barbara Smith, Barbara Christian, C. Riley Snorton, Christina Sharpe, Imani Perry, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Jennifer Nash, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sylvia Wynter, Chela Sandoval, and Saidiya Hartman.