Chapter 2: Black Women Intellectuals: Othering, Mothering, Resilience, and Madness

Black women intellectuals have seen, heard and experienced the gender-blind politics of intersectionality within and beyond higher education. These varied experiences have helped to shape and shift the lens through which we engage sense-making of the ways in which Black women at all levels of the academy are othered, ignored, and disregarded, while simultaneously remaining committed to social justice.

The discourses designed to be liberating for Black women in academic spaces insist on the dominance of a race first, gender second paradigm; that is, efforts to center Black women’s experiences hinge on several erroneous assumptions. The first is that Black women identify as Black first and woman second. The second assumption is that by addressing racial issues, gender issues will automatically be resolved. Third, race and gender markers comprise the totality of Black women’s experiences and rather than occurring simultaneously, Black women experience them linearly and separately. Each of these assumptions is rooted in gender-blind intersectionality, ultimately affecting how Black women’s voices and bodies show up in larger social justice efforts. Carbado (2013) explains that gender-blind intersectionality occurs when maleness fuels the reproduction of inequities as a “cognizable social category but is invisible or unarticulated as an intersectional subject position” (p. 2). In other words, Black, men (regardless of sexual identity) represent an identifiable category whose maleness is seldom articulated in a manner that reveals intersectional failures.