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Introduction
- NYU Press
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Introduction At the core of Christian tradition is a call to morally engage this world by demonstrated opposition to social injustice and human suffering . As Beverly Harrison describes, this Christian calling means confronting “as Jesus did, that which thwarts the power of human personal and communal becoming, that which denies human well-being, community , and human solidarity.”1 In response, Christian social ethicists construct contextual analysis that names the pernicious elements of society that need to be confronted and opposed. There is no more compelling societal problem in need of redress than black women’s experience of male violence. This study arises from the fact that in the United States, white supremacy, patriarchy, and intimate violence often represent simultaneous, heinous violations of the personal and communal becoming of African-American2 women. This book takes up the task of developing useful ways to analytically deconstruct the consequences of such violations and identify methods of resisting them. My motivation for analyzing the problem of violence against black women stems from my personal witness of both the anguish and the resilience of black women victim-survivors. The stories of women that I have encountered over the years as a college student activist and later while working as a parish pastor and campus chaplain, have repeatedly provided the impetus for my engagement of this topic. It is by personally listening to women that I have come to recognize the specific, interwoven nature of the intimate and systemic violence African-American women face. Intimate violence represents an alarming problem in this culture. Over the last thirty years, feminist social activists and researchers have led the struggle to broaden public awareness and promote the creation of compassionate and transformative responses to violence against women. As a result, the long tradition of silence about the prevalence, societal reproduction, and consequences of violence against women is now 1 increasingly being broken by a range of sources including self-help books, mass media talk shows, and academic studies. Unfortunately, even recent studies too often relegate black women to the margins. The specific dynamics of black women’s experiences of intimate violence are frequently either given scant attention or completely blotted out by “universally” applicable assertions that are derived from white women. In particular, the characteristics of women’s emotional and spiritual trauma are often assumed to be generalizable across racial boundaries. The ways that racism violates the construction of black female identity are considered irrelevant to the consequences of intimate violence. This book challenges such generalizations and assumptions by placing the personal histories and cultural conditions of black women at its center. In method as well as content, I address the repressive impact of omissions of, and easy generalizations about, violence against black women. Methodologically, I maintain the concrete suffering of black women victim -survivors as my criterion for evaluating the moral harm generated by intimate violence. I focus specifically on the ways in which women are compelled to assume the qualities of shamefulness and invisibility, and examine how these socially induced responses further contribute to their emotional and spiritual trauma in the aftermath of male assault. Then, by unearthing the ideologies that devalue and dismiss their personhood, I reveal further dimensions of the social constructions that compound the debilitating consequences of intimate violence. Morally interrogating the violence against African-American women helps to unravel some of the elements that keep male violence secured within the social fabric of our culture. The moral implications of the harm to women that surface in the investigation become an index for the moral assessment of this society. This task of unraveling reveals how social norms operate as moral norms instigating, sanctioning, and augmenting male violence against black women. Deprecating social ideologies about black women spawn a collection of claims that legitimate the violence. The construction and application of these violence-legitimating claims inflicts moral harm. Exposing the way this harm is inflicted involves naming the particular demeaning and repressive cultural ingredients that abet the torment of black women victim-survivors. Note that the moral harm is doubly constituted by the damage inflicted upon women as well as by the polluting effect of intimate violence on the moral health of the broader society. 2 | Introduction [3.218.247.159] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:30 GMT) Of course, many of the consequences of intimate violence that will be described are applicable to women of other racial/ethnic groups. However , in this study I deliberately avoid making assertions about the impact of violence...