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W hile the significance of race and class within the Black liberation movement has been debated extensively, the issue of gender and the interplay of feminism and antiracism are not adequately theorized outside the Black feminist tradition. Black feminist or womanist thought, both implicit and explicit, contains a critique of racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and Eurocentrism . It also contains a powerful critique of patriarchal notions in Black nationalism while often offering a corrective Black feminist nationalism (or Afrocentrism), oriented not solely toward nation building per se but toward reconceptualizing race, class, and gender as interlocking systems of oppression. The power of the theoretical formulations in Black feminist thought, most powerfully articulated by Patricia Hill Collins, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, Barbara Ransby, Frances Beal, Rose Brewer, bell hooks, Linda Burham and others, is that it transcends what might be called a counterhegemonic ideology, like that of more traditional Afrocentrism, to create a form of knowledge that is not simply oppositional but involves dialogue between partial perspectives where there is no need to decenter the experience of others (except for the dominant group, which by definition must be decentered). In this dialogue everyone has a voice, but everyone must listen and respond to others in order to remain in the community. Collins argues that sharing a common cause fosters dialogue and encourages groups to transcend their differences. Rose Brewer (2003) has sought explicitly to breech the disjunction between Black radicalism’s almost exclusive focus on the race-class dialectic by utilizing a gender critique. She knows that this will not be an easy task, because concern with race, white supremacy, and capitalist economic exploitation has been the driving force behind Black radical theory and practice despite the more compli4 Black Feminism, Intersectionality, and the Critique of Masculinist Models of Liberation Black Feminism, Intersectionality, and the Critique of Masculinist Models of Liberation 133 cated social world that this movement sought to transform, a world with a variety of forms of domination, including those of gender and sexuality. Black radical theory, Brewer argues, has long operated on the basis of a generic notion of African American life that renders the complexity and multiplicity of African American life nearly invisible with regard to gender and sexuality. It is therefore of great significance that alongside the emergence of a Black radical praxis concerned with race and class in the last few decades has been a Black feminist critique (Brewer 2003:112). During slavery, Black women were constructed as producers and reproducers , as laborers in the production of wealth, and as women in the reproduction of material and social life. Brewer follows Bonnie Thornton Dill (1979) in asserting that these women resisted, defined themselves, and were probably the first Black feminists. They were certainly active in antislavery societies, which gave rise to the first wave of feminism in the United States. As Angela Davis (1983) points out, however, the suffragette movement of the first wave of feminism ultimately foundered on the conflict between women’s rights and African American rights. Davis points out that this stance reflected long-standing structural and ideological contradictions in the United States, so it should not be a surprise that the underlying racism of the movement spearheaded by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton continued during the second wave of feminism, in the 1960s and 1970s. In both cases for Black women, the fight for African American rights took precedence over the fight for women’s rights. While during the first wave of feminism, black women were ignored by the suffragettes, during the second wave of feminism , black women were faced with the choice of going forward in a women’s movement that, once again, did not really include them, or supporting the rights of African Americans as a race without attending to the pressing gender issues that faced Black women. Davis does not equivocate that she feels that this was a very difficult choice. She clearly elucidates the failure of both waves of feminism to include all women and shows how necessary it is for women, regardless of race, to work together. Given the prominence of white racial chauvinism among white men and white women, both the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement fell back on the race-first outlook until the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Black feminists began to stake out a voice among the women of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and among Black lesbian feminists who came together in the Combahee River Collective as...

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