Feminism paper

Who's Schooling Who? Black Women and the Bringing of the Everyday into Academe, or Why We Started "The Womanist"

Layli Phillips; Barbara McCaskill

Signs, Vol. 20, No. 4, Postcolonial, Emergent, and Indigenous Feminisms. (Summer, 1995), pp. 1007-1018.

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Who's Schooling Who? Black Women and the Bringing of the Everyday into Academe, or Why We Started The Womanist

L a y l i P h i l l i p s a n d B a r b a r a M c C a s k i l l

A story: Layli

I B E C A M E A W 0 M A N I S T the moment I read Michele Russell's "Black-Eyed Blues Connections: Teaching Black Women" in Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith's All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black

Women's Studies (Russell 1982). At the time, I was a single-parenting, food stampgetting, 'hood-living graduate student in supposed preparation for a high-powered, mainstream, solidly middle-class career in teaching and research. Before I read Michele Russell's essay, my life was the story of polarities: going back and forth between the food stamp line and the graduate seminar, between the WIC appointment and the halls of aca- deme. I tried as hard as possible to keep the two worlds separate, to act as though my less than optimal grades (despite my "stellar" intellect) had nothing to d o with the fact that I could not afford the textbooks and had no food in the refrigerator, and as though my "strange" way of raising my kids had nothing to d o with the fact that I was being trained as a devel- opmental psychologist and was, by virtue of the nature of graduate school, spending most of my time around considerably older, better-heeled, and "differently cultured" colleagues/models of parenthood than with other young sister-mothers with young children like myself. It was a schizo- phrenic existence, and "Black-Eyed Blues Connections" came to the rescue.

In her essay, Michele Russell writes:

In Detroit, I am a t the Downtown YWCA. Rooms o n the upper floors are used by Wayne County Community College as learning centers. It is 1 0 A.M. and I am convening an introductory Black

[Signs: Journal of W o m e n in Culture and Society 1 9 9 5 , vol. 20, no. 41 O 1995 by T h e University o f Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-974019512004-0012$01.00

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studies class for women o n Community a n d Identity. The twenty- t w o women who appear are all o n their way from somewhere t o something. This is a breather in their day. They range in age from nineteen t o fifty-five. They all have been pregnant more than once a n d have made various decisions about abortion, adoption, mo- nogamy, custody, a n d sterilization. Some are great-grandmothers. A few have their children along. They are a cross-section of hundreds of Black women I have known and learned from in the past fifteen years. . . . We have an hour together. The course is a survey. The first topic of conversation-among themselves and with me-is what they went through just to make it in the door, o n time. That, in itself, becomes a lesson. (1982, 1 9 6 - 9 7 )

She continues, describing the beginnings of a working methodology:

We start where they are. We exchange stories of children's clothes ripped or lost, of having to go t o school with sons and explain why Che is always late a n d how he got that funny name, anyway, t o teachers w h o shouldn't have t o ask and don't really care. They tell of waiting for men to come home from the night shift so they can get the money or car necessary t o get downtown, or power failures in the neighborhood, or administrative red tape a t the college, o r compulsory overtime o n their own jobs, o r the length of food stamp lines, o r just being tired and needing sleep. Some of the stories are funny, some sad; some elicit outrage and praise from the group. It's a familiar a n d comfortable ritual in Black culture. It's called testi- fying. ( 1 9 7 )

Finally she concludes: "The role of the teacher? Making the process conscious, the content significant. . . . Learn what daily survival wisdom these women have. Care. Don't let it stop a t commiseration. Try t o help them generalize from the specifics" ( 1 9 7 ) . Encapsulated, her view is that "political education of Black women in America . . . becomes radical when, as teachers, we develop a methodology that places daily life at the center of history and enables Black women t o struggle for survival with the knowledge that they are making history" ( 1 9 6 ) .

White men have had the luxury of knowing that they are making history. All the history books-the histories of every discipline-attest t o this. Black women, o n the other hand, have had t o construct this knowl- edge outside the traditional locale of knowledge validation, that is, out- side the academy. Over many generations of constructing this knowledge and gradually chipping away a t the impermeability of the academy, Black women intellectuals, whether inside o r outside the academy, have created

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systems of translation between these two milieus-the academic and the everyday. They have created tools with which to work o n the ~ r o b l e m s of exclusion and marginalization.

Michele Russell's essay, as emblematized by her subtitle, spoke t o and reconciled both sides of my dilemma: the teacher (i.e., the academic) and the Black woman. It translated and connected the two worlds for me. As a result of her essay, I was able to reformulate these disparate yet fun- damental elements of my existence in terms of complementarity rather than tension and to realize that both could be harmonized without the sacrifice of either. Her essay had been a tool, the ultimate function of which was my liberation.

It has been traditional to conceptualize education as emanating out from the academy to "the community" and to conceptualize helping as emanating out from those with more socially sanctioned power and wealth to those who are considered disenfranchised or marginal. This schematic has perpetually placed Black women-who have since their arrival in this country borne the brunt of the triple oppression of race, class, and gender-on the receiving end of every handout or supposed charitable act, as if to proclaim, "You are only needy; you have nothing to offer." Such posturing has been a long-standing insult t o Black women as human beings and as participants in society, not to mention to Black women as card-carrying members of the sweat equity club and possessors of a unique wisdom born of a particular social and cultural history. Such posturing has permitted the interpretation that the academy has nothing to gain from everyday Black women and their experiences and that ev- eryday Black women have everything to gain from the academy. In ad- dition, this unspoken assumption has permitted--even tacitly encouraged- a dismissal of everyday Black women's experiences as material worthy of scholarly investigation and of everyday Black women themselves as ca- pable generators, interpreters, or validators of knowledge, even when that knowledge pertains to their own experiences. My argument, how- ever, is that this exquisite and ironic marginalization has not only hurt Black women, it has hurt the academy.

In her essay, Russell focuses on the education of everyday Black women and the validation of Black women's everyday experiences by Black women themselves within academic settings. The concealed premise is that entry into academic settings for everyday Black women has been facilitated by a "teacher"-a Black woman who has, in all historical probability, "played the game" well enough and long enough to persuade the academy that she is nonthreatening and will not subvert its traditional objectives. Yet, this Black woman, this teacher, has, like the Trojan horse or trickster, managed to maintain, cultivate, or shield her Black womanness beyond the academy's line of vision. It-her Black

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womanness-has become her secret weapon for both the liberation of more sisters a n d the revolutionizing of the academy itself.

When Black women enter the academy, they bring with them different kinds of lives-lives shaped by the ubiquitous and historically inescap- able fact of triple oppression. All Black women, regardless of their social background, have had to formulate themselves in response to this fact. It becomes inevitable, then, that when Black women enter academe, they bring with them all of the knowledge and expertise that has accrued around this particular fact of their existence. Black women's lives are not, however, defined by the fact of triple oppression; Black women also bring with them intergenerationally transmitted experiential and metatheoreti- cal frameworks based on their ancient African origins and what it meant t o be a woman in Black Africa. Together, these t w o facts-triple oppres- sion and African origins-generate unique thematic concerns and inter- pretive frameworks that, when brought in by Black women, enrich the academy, further humanize it, and make it more accessible t o a wider segment of humanity, including, but not limited to, Black women.

Examples of these themes, which can be gleaned from the writings of numerous womanist a n d Black feminist scholars, include spirituality, struggle a n d activism, work, and the politics of interlocking oppressions. Black women d r a w interpretive frameworks from their unique social, cultural, and historical experiences. For example, from their integral knowledge of extended family, Black women have drawn valuable mod- els of harmonizing complex and diverse social systems. From their notion of sisterhood, Black women have drawn models of research in which research "subjects" are not "subjected" to objectification, anonymity, a n d power imbalances but, rather, are elevated t o esteemed research collabo- rators, named historical personages, a n d empowered citizens. From their history of dance, Black women have constructed p o l ~ r h y t h m i c under- standings of complex natural and human phenomena. The metaphors Black women bring t o the table of scholarly activity have the potential to benefit both the humanities and the sciences, whether social, biological, o r physical, by increasing the number a n d variety of models and frames available for the explanation of phenomena and the construction of knowledge.

Perhaps the central organizing principle of womanism (if it can be said that there is one) is the absolute necessity of speaking from and about one's own experiential location and not t o o r about someone else's. Black women's scholarship has laced Black women and their experiences a t the center of analysis just like traditional White men's scholarship has placed White men a n d their experiences a t the center of analysis; the crucial difference is that Black women's scholarship has articulated and owned the centering, whereas traditional White men's scholarship has

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not. Black women's scholarship does not parade as universal, but rather it emanates from a point of acute authenticity and invites others to participate in a similar, equally authentic, process. While traditional White men's scholarship presumes to have a monopoly on content as well as method, Black women's scholarship underscores the fallacy and pom- posity of such a presumption. Ironically, universality emerges not from the imposition of sameness and the enforced proclamation that "we're all just human underneath it all," but from the careful and respectful ac- knowledgment that both individuals and groups have experiences that generate differences in both vision and concern and the recognition that these differences can contribute t o the robustness and optimal function- ing of the human race as a whole.

Because Black women are intimately familiar with the experience of having one's experience appropriated, exploited, misconstrued, and ulti- mately dismissed, Black feminists and womanists have developed an epis- temological stance that demands the acknowledgment of one's particular location prior to the pronouncement of knowledge. Furthermore, be- cause Black women carry with them an Afrocentric cultural ethos that purports that reality is both spiritual and material, that self-knowledge is the basis of all knowledge, that knowledge can be obtained through the use of symbolic imagery (metaphorlparable) and rhythm (pattern), and that positive relationships among humans are the highest value (Myers 1991), Black feminists and womanists offer a methodological stance that is dialogic or conversational in approach, that views the relationship between researcher and research subject as collaborative and equal, that incorporates activism into the scientific method, and that does not dis- count the importance of spiritual as well as material (including concrete, everyday) scientific concerns (Collins 1990). Black feministlwomanist science speaks unapologetically and authoritatively in the first person and resists the excessive canonization that would suggest that science and scholarship are essentially exclusive or objective pursuits. In fact, Black feminist1womanist science and scholarship utilize dialogue and story as metaphors for knowledge construction and validation.

Another story: Barbara

I am an endangered species, but I sing no victim's song. I am a woman. I am an artist. And I know where my voice belongs. (DIANA 1994)REEVES

This is my location. It is not at all easy to revolutionize the question and to ask, What is it that nonacademic, everyday women bring to womanist scholarship in the academy? I am troubled by this question. Perhaps I am

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troubled because, as a predominately white university-trained scholar of literature and literary history, I am disciplined to think all too often from the center-my center, my area of specialization, my research orientation, or what have you-and then to spiral out. More than this, I am troubled by what I perceive t o be this question's concealed ahistorical, elitist as- sumption, in spite of Layli's appropriate recentering of everyday women, that the center of an aspiring womanist academic originates in academe. This question and its reverse seem, first, to propose that a kind of Demili- tarized Zone distinguishes universities from the communities that sur- round them; then, that this Zone, once transgressed by Someone Like Me, morphs t o a n Ivory Curtain crashing down between the esoteric womanist scholars that Someone Like M e aspires to and the nonscholars, relevant and accountable, that Someone Like M e once resembled. I would like to see womanist scholarship progress so that neither this question nor an inversion of it necessitates a proposal in the first place. To me, both sides of the question constitute the tip of a glacier to which many of us black women scholars cling.' Meanwhile, our base is evaporating at warp speed in a terminal moment of meltdown. And our hands are slipping.

So I a m going t o practice what I preach in my approach to this issue of the intersection of womanist scholarship and black women out there, by referring in my section of this viewpoint to both nonacademic and academic, womanist and nonwomanist black women as we. I will extend Layli's first-person statement t o the first-person plural. Because I am out there, too-and more frequently, a t times with staccato, fortissimo fre- quency, than I a m in here. I am out there when white students complain that I read race in every text, and when students and faculty, both black and white, insinuate that I owe my appointment solely to such benefac- tors as "generous standards," "admissions adjustments," "administrative pressures" / "administrative rewards," and "minority initiatives." I am in here when I read article after article on the endangered black male spe- cies, and when my analyst's mind engages such facts as my mother is fighting breast cancer and so little research dispatches specific protocols for black women, that black women are soaring in the AIDS statistics, that black women are most likely t o suffer depression and least likely t o have this depression diagnosed, that black women are the most under- paid of all Americans. I am a virtual simulcast of out there and in here.

So where d o I hang the curtain rods? Where d o you? And what exactly d o we everyday, academic black women bring t o

womanist scholarship, t o womanist research and practice? Foremost, I

' The difference in the capitalization of the term black in the two parts of this essay is intentional, marking a difference of opinion between the authors. One of the main tenets of womanism is such accomnlodation of diversity.

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think we bring an assumption that what we accomplish becomes relevant and accountable especially when and since our lives d o not dovetail materially, culturally, socially, or historically. Layli's observation bears repeating here: "Black women's scholarship does n o t parade as univer- sal." In "The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Crack," a November 1993 forum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Regina Austin commented, "The issue is not whether intellectuals are doing well; it's whether other folks are doing well. And other folks are not doing well" (1994, 6). By virtue of its interdisciplinary and multilat- eral focus, womanist scholarship proposes that as long as "other folks" are not doing well, academics-be they womanists, feminists, Marxist feminists, postmodernists, anarchists, or what have you-are not doing well either. I guess that I am offering womanist scholarship as a critique of the assumption that an electrified ideological barricade a priori stands between us based o n academic pedigree, class affiliation, sexual prefer- ence, make and plate of car, degree of literacy attained, pre- or postmari- tal status, and other factors. This is not t o say that we d o not disagree or divide among ourselves. Rather, a t the center of womanist scholarship stands a forgone conclusion that we d o demonstrate the capabilities of collaborating and withstanding the walls that divide us. And we d o this more frequently and harmoniously than is reported.

In womanist scholarship operates a mystique that many of us surely recognize. Michele Russell's classes at the downtown YWCA speak to this mystique. With no romanticization or exoticism intended, I think of this as the mystique of the Tribe. In my high school, circa 1975, a mi- croscopic nucleus of African American students diverged in many direc- tions on just about every issue. Yet we thought of ourselves as the Tribe. We came from different classes. We were tracked a t different levels. Some of us had traveled; some had families that never had moved from the same hometown. We had naturals and perms, platforms and loafers, A-line skirts and attitudes, the latest issues of X - M e n and the library's only copy of W a r a n d Peace. Yet we thought of ourselves as the Tribe.

The Tribe did not contravene these distinctions; rather, it proliferated them and exploited their potential. We were the Family Stone and the P-Funk Mothership Connection, and sometimes our attire came pretty close to rivaling Sly, George, Bootsie, Maceo, and the rest! When one of us became pregnant and school policy dictated her expulsion, the Tribe, all nine of us then as I recall, left our tasks and trooped before the entranceway's heavy double doors so that she saw us when the principal rifled the contents of her locker and ushered her away. Thus, we were a community that theorized: we critiqued the stigmas and stereotypes that estranged our lives from academic protocol, and in opportune moments we mobilized and blew the suckers up! Every Tribal member carved her

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or his niche; where none was apparent, one was nurtured: sports, chem- istry, debate, even clowning. The Tribe was delicate and solid, consen- sual, a self-generated configuration that easily slipped into the dictatorial o r patriarchal, but most of the time meant a dynamic construction that accomplished results.

This is the sort of impulse that we bring to womanist scholarship. By dint of our differences, womanist scholarship is composed of transfor- mative harmony, proactive tension, and regenerative collaboration. Womanist scholarship resists dogma, and it offers a vision of intellectual leadership in which reliance and responsibility are not approached as handicaps but as liberatory strategies. Joy James's theory of black women autobiographers1activists as "living thinkers" concretizes this philosophy and resists "the worldview that corporate academia sells: self-reliant iso- lation and competition" (1993, 43). James presents such revolutionary black women as Assata Shakur, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Anne Moody, and Angela Davis as such living thinkers whose theorizing "requires understanding or at least recognizing the conditions and sources of op- pression, both specific to one people and universal," as thinkers whose theorizing "bound to the community, forces a response not only to [their] struggles as a revolutionary hut to those of the community as well" (1993, 41).

So the hardest part for many of us is not bringing womanist pedagogylwomanist practices into anything. The difficulty is generating out of self-reliant, self-serving academic societies, like the proverbial round peg in the square hole, the responsibility for collective well-being, women's and men's, and the reliance upon each other that are second nature to most contemporary womanist enterprises. As we practice a community-bound scholarship, we black women often find ourselves divided between official commitments to our disciplinary homes and commitments to cultivating black women's studies in sociopolitical realms that we often consider more satisfying, and our peers regard as less enriching, than the former. Just how many of us, for example, are cultivating curricula vitae in two departments for tenure? And of this population, how many of us hold appointments in only one institute, department, o r program? As we strive to create a community-bound intellectual record, we black women are too often asked to make an all-or-nothing choice: either generate our own scholarship or retrieve and evaluate the talents of other generations of black women and risk dire consequences. Just how many of us have risked the breach, editing as many projects as we have authored individually? H o w many of us are guilty of sneaking in just one more lecture to a student or civic group during Kwanzaa o r black or women's history month, even though we know our colleagues mightily disapprove?

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The academy bifurcates our pursuits into two paths-focused (or tenurable) and scattered (or irrelevant). It pits us in an adversarial relationship that opposes home, family, neighborhood, church, and culture versus Quality Time on the PC for our focused, relevant, aca- demic projects. This dichotomy stands as another exquisite marginaliza- tion that harms both black women and the academy. It implies that well-roundedness is a pathology, the equivalent of academic arrested development, and it condemns our real black women's lives as at best inconsequential precisely because we find this well-roundedness unavoid- able and vital.

Black women, Latina women, Asian women, Native women, white women-women-all, t o greater and lesser degrees, experience the re- strictions of this Hobson's choice between scholarship and community. Yet there are palpable cultural perspectives that influence how black women experience and negotiate these restrictions differently from other women. Black culture converges the meanings of the terms intellectual, teacher, and activist. Black culture views academic institutions as vehicles for knowledge production, preservation, and dissemination that are ir- reducible to four walls, one canon, and scores of competing theoretical and discursive fiefdoms. Black culture, finally, defines a community as inclusive of both individual, blood-related, family members and broader social networks. These legacies, among others, make pursuing an aca- demic profession more than any single black woman's choice of family time over career advancement. It is a choice that places the body of black female intellectual endeavor on a course that collides head-on with aca- demic culture.

Womanist philosophy jettisons these tensions and helps us black women to understand that our well-roundedness fulfills our highest ex- pectations as scholars and can function as its own reward. Womanist philosophy appreciates and cultivates the well-rounded, dialectical teacherslresearchers, the Michele Russells of knowledge construction. Womanism resists the dichotomy between focused and scattered pursuits by its emphasis on the community work that is foundational in the collective histories of black women. "Community work," as Cheryl Townsend Gilkes explains, "is a constant struggle, and it consists of everything that people d o to address oppression in their own lives, suf- fering in the lives of others, and their sense of solidarity or group kinship" ( 1 9 9 4 , 2 3 1 ) . When we integrate this womanist interpretation of commu- nity work into our colleges and universities, we arrest focus and elevate struggle. We write, produce, grade papers, edit The Womanist in the ghettoes of midnight work sessions and the gulped-down, solitary lunch hours at our desks-between classes, committees, advising sessions, semi- nars, and consultations. We struggle on, determined to accomplish our

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efforts without sacrificing our commitments for focus, because those workers that we know-workers, incidentally, who we are-know that the efforts must be made.

Finally, we bring to womanist enterprises the insight that culture thrives on a creole diet. Womanists sample. Another way to articulate this is to say, as one of my Afrocentric students loved to proclaim, that we clothe ourselves in our culture. "Go to the source," advice we have often heard as students and scholars, is a moot point to us. We are the sources, the everyday black women, as much as we are the gathererslinterpreters of the data, the "capable generators," as Layli describes us. We are like rappers who engage each other's rhythms and rhymes: borrowing from records, infiltrating them with our own lyrics and sounds, and then be- coming the new source that is borrowed. In other words, we do not have a problem with our own subjectivity. To speak from our own locations, as Layli has put it, is not an issue. As Patricia Hill Collins writes, "For ordinary African-American women, those individuals who have lived through the experiences about which they claim to be experts are more believable and credible than those who have merely read or thought about such experiences" (1990, 209). Wherever we are as womanists, "lived through" or "read about," out there or in here, we bring a confi- dence in evaluating our own experiences, dictating our own discourses, and defining our own terms. Maybe this is what we bring the most. Maybe this is where we belong.

Why we started The Womanist: Layli and Barbara

The idea for The Womanist-A Newsletter for Afrocentric Feminist Researchers was born out of a desire to empower others as Michele Russell and other Black feministslwomanists had empowered us as well as a desire to "create more space" for Black feminism and womanism in the academy. Knowing that the project entailed some professional risk, we initially vacillated, but our decision to publish it, one way or another, was cemented when we attended the first national conference of Black women academics, "Black Women in the Academy: Defending O u r Name, 1894-1994," held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, January 13-15,1994. Good fortune followed in the form of a grant from the Institute for African-American Studies at the University of Georgia, under the direction of R. Baxter Miller, who agreed to underwrite the production.

The Womanist-A Newsletter for Afrocentric Feminist Researchers was conceived as a forum for the exposition of theory and research. Quoting from the statement of purpose that appeared on the initial an-

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nouncement for The Womanist, "The Womanist is meant t o be a gath- ering place for Afrocentric feminist researchers w h o are struggling to devise, develop, and disseminate womanist methodologies within tradi- tional (or non-traditional) academic disciplines . . . a place where we can share ideas, ask questions, and engage in supportive criticism, in order to strengthen our mission, de-marginalize our activities, and provide wider access to our perspectives" (The Womanist 1994). The essential purpose of the publication was to help Black women who are trying to bring the everyday into the academy as well as to help the academy by presenting the everyday in a format that academicians could understand. The idea was to disrupt the traditional notion that Black women are merely the beneficiaries of academia in favor of the notion that the academy, par- ticularly in this era of anxiety about "changing demographics," is the beneficiary of Black women's presence. In addition, the idea was t o pro- vide validation for Black women that, having entered the doors of aca- demia, we nevertheless have not left our beloved everyday lives behind. The choice of a one-word moniker-womanist-reflected our position that Afrocentric feminism is more than just the sum of Afrocentrism and feminism.

We view The Womanist as a tool-a testament to the fact that, with all respect to Audre Lorde (1984), you can dismantle the master's house with the master's tools (after all, that's what he built it with) at the same time as you are forging new tools and building new struc- tures. In addition, we view The Womanist as part of a larger project on the part of Black women everywhere: to make the institutional realm more accurately reflect our presence and our experiences. In such an endeavor, however, Black women also open the door for other margin- alized o r excluded groups and for the inclusion and institutional valida- tion of their experiences and concerns. For this reason, Black feminism1 womanism is a crucial aspect of the reformulation of the academy as a whole.

In sum, to interrogate "Who's Schooling Who?" is to look at what the academy has to gain (and has gained) from Black women, Black femi- nists, womanists, and their kin. It is to recognize how Black women have educated and can educate the academy about knowledge-its collection, its generation, its validation, and its dissemination. It is our hope that The Womanist can in some way assist in this undertaking.

Department of Psychology a n d Institute for African-American Studies University of Georgia (Phillips)

Department of English University of Georgia (McCaskill)

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References

Austin, Regina. 1994. "The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Crack." Boston Review 19(1):3-9.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.

Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend. 1994. " 'If It Wasn't for the Women . . . ': African American Women, Community Work, and Social Change." In Women of Color in U.S. Society, ed. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill, 229-46. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

James, Joy. 1993. "African Philosophy, Theory, and 'Living Thinkers.' " In Spirit, Space and Survival: African American Women in (White) Academe, ed. Joy James and Ruth Farmer, 31-46. New York: Routledge.

Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider. Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing. Myers, Linda James. 1991. "Expanding the Psychology of Knowledge Optimally:

The Importance of Worldview Revisited." In Black Psychology, ed. Reginald Jones, 15-28. Berkeley: Cobb & Henry.

Reeves, Diana. 1994. "Endangered Species." Song 6 on her compact disc Art and Survival. EM1 Records.

Russell, Michele. 1982. "Black-Eyed Blues Connections: Teaching Black Women." In All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies, ed. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, 196-207. New York: Feminist Press.

The Womanist. 1994. The Womanist-A Newsletter for Afrocentric Feminist Researchers, promotional flyer. Presented a t "Black Women in the Academy: Defending O u r Name, 1894-1994," Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, January 13-15.

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