Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice, and: The American Dream in Black and White: The Clarence Thomas Hearings (review)

Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice by Patricia Hill Collins. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, 312 pp., $47.95 hardcover, $16.95 paper.

The American Dream in Black and White: The Clarence Thomas Hearings by Jane Flax. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998, 170 pp., $25.00 hardcover.

In Fighting Words, Collins delivers the content promised by her Black Feminist Thought, a theoretical framework for black women's knowledge and identity (1990). In The American Dream in Black and White, Flax interprets the written transcripts of the Clarence Thomas hearings to show how the lack of relevant theory, and apparent ignorance about race/gender by United States Senators, caused Anita Hill's testimony to lose credibility by erasing her identity. Both books address the plight of black women in what ought to be positions of authority (i.e., positions where their power is recognized). Each advances a much needed discussion, beyond feminism and identity politics for black women and, presumably, for women of color generally.

Collins's development of theory stems from practical and ideological concerns about the politics of racial containment, or contemporary institutionalized racism, which is effected through surveillance and segregation by race and gender. Her ideal is oppositional theory, which neither rejects the "master's tools" outright, nor uses them unreflectively. In Part I of Fighting Words, black women's knowledge is historically situated from their pre-civil rights civic work within black communities through their entry into previously barred professions. As black women began to benefit from government assistance, the welfare state itself came under attack and many public resources began to be privatized. The black female middle class is expected to assimilate into white society and is ignored by the media, which sensationalizes underclass women and exaggerates the success of super-achievers. Before the 1970s, black women were expected to subordinate their interests to black men for the good of "the race," and since then, black female voices have been commodified and appropriated to the neglect of the working mass of black women. Collins is critical of womanism for confusing its own ideals with reality, and of black feminism for overlooking the racism inherent in white feminism.

In Part II of Fighting Words, Collins brings her critique into specific scholarly areas, particularly sociology. She explains how any social theory may have dominant and progressive dimensions. She rejects "fighting words doctrine" because attempts to legislate hate speech and other recent violent expressions have failed in the courts and been ineffective in social contexts. Collins notes that as past objects, and new agents of knowledge in sociology, black women need to use quantitative methods to study their own intersectionalities of race, gender, and class. She believes that postmodern strategies of difference, decentering, and deconstruction can be useful provided that difference is not merely commodified in exclusionary language. She argues that deconstruction of the black female subject is not useful in constructing a politics of resistance. On the other hand, Collins is chary of Afrocentrism insofar as it supports essentialist identities that are often severed from political programs.

In Part III of Fighting Words, Collins moves "beyond critique" to describe a project of black women's visionary pragmatism. She advocates the use of standpoint theory to generate standards for everyday action in contexts of injustice. A group's location in a power hierarchy produces shared challenges for members. Visionary pragmatism requires that scholars speak to people about their lives and inspire them to struggle. Here, the importance of a love ethic is stressed, as the out-sider within status of Sojourner Truth is invoked.

Fighting Words is compendious in cataloging the intellectual work of black women in the twentieth century, and the theory is rigorously worked out with comprehensive scholarly apparatus. It admirably fulfills the motto of...