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Introduction: African American Feminist Practices
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
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Introduction African American Feminist Practices Abstract political and moral statements, however inspiring they may be, do not in themselves produce social change. Real change requires real-life action. This collection of first-person narratives provides much-needed examples of the concrete ways in which contemporary African Americans, both women and men, live by feminist principles, not just as beliefs or theories but by our actions in concrete situations. Feminists—whether inside or outside academic settings—are accustomed to working with ideas and models that are part of a larger ideology of social justice, which we need to understand and transform our world. Feminism, however, is more than a set of theories and perspectives associated with a particular ideology; it is something we put into practice. How can ordinary people, whether or not they identify themselves as feminists, apply to their daily lives the basic idea that women are as fully human as men? And if we do identify as feminists, how do we relate our feminist ideas and values to our behavior? The African American women and men in this book share personal accounts of how they encountered feminist ideas and are using them now as a guide to living, expressed in relevant, everyday practices. A person, female or male, whose feminism is practical recognizes that there is an imbalance of power between men and women in our society and acts publicly and privately in ways to correct that imbalance.1 The personal chapters included here reveal how feminist principles affect people’s perception of their ability to change themselves as well as society. At the heart of our autobiographical chapters, we address the following questions with examples from our lived experiences: How can people understand what the personal benefits of feminism are, when so much of the information available about it is conveyed through elitist (and often biased and hostile) print and electronic media sources? In what ways can feminists contribute to the rehumanization of society when we ourselves have been deeply traumatized by its dehumanizing aspects? As we fight for social justice institutionally, how can we practice it individually? How can we make feminism work in our lives? 1 2 African Americans Doing Feminism Authors in the collection emphasize that we must reflect seriously on our everyday lives; otherwise, we become oblivious to the reality that there may be a huge gap between our expressed feminist ideas and the real values that drive our acts. If there is a gap, we become activists in the abstract but not in our everyday behavior. Personal reflection on the real-life consequences of our human frailties reminds us that we are not above reproach. As we fight for the realization of certain values at the institutional level, we must also realize that these values are meaningless if they are absent from our habitual practices. Admittedly, we have contradictions. African Americans Doing Feminism reveals how we learn to face them and work to transcend them. Our experiences suggest that if we maintain a long-term commitment to change, if we are truly accountable to a movement that represents our best intentions, our behavior will gradually fall in line with our ideas. The Personal Is Political: Institutional Forces and Individual Behavior Sometimes the personal is not self-evidently political; therefore, in each chapter the contributors to this book attempt to make the connection between our individual problems, perceptions, and choices and the institutions that have shaped those factors. We believe it is important to make the link between private and public worlds because the difficulty in changing ourselves is related, in part, to the difficulty of changing political and economic structures that reinforce dehumanizing behavior that demeans women and men. Often, when we change our interpersonal behavior to support our feminist beliefs, we collide with other people, power relations, and institutions that strive to censure us. Our struggle to dismantle the effects of sexism in our personal lives also requires changing the institutional structures that reinforce sexism and the other oppressive systems that intersect with sexism (e.g., racism, heterosexism, and economic inequalities). Because of those connections, while reading this work it is important to remain mindful of the social forces that both shape and sanction individual behavior. These are not simply stories about personal issues that feminists have with others. Rather, these “sociopolitical” narratives demonstrate how underlying our personal life experiences are institutional factors that shape our experiences and our responses to what happens to us. Our responses either support or challenge...