Knowing in Space

Abstract: In attempting to create a US Black feminist philosophy, I have uncovered three lessons in US Black women’s social theory. They are the following: 1) oppression is a multistable, social phenomenon; 2) many US Black women identify occupying a negative, socio-epistemic space as part of their experience of oppression; and 3) addressing oppression for many Black women will require grappling with politics of social spatiality. These insights are by no means new. However, the fact that these tropes can be identified in almost 200 years of Black women's social theory in the US is far more distinctive than many allow. In this paper, I extract each of these three lessons so as to begin the process towards inheriting several positions in Black feminist theory.

Key Words: Multistability of Oppression, Socio-Epistemic Space, and Politics of Social Spatiality, US Black Feminist Philosophy, The Combahee River Collective, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Anna Julia Cooper

In her article, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” Bernice Johnson Reagan advocates for leaving a legacy of one’s libratory praxis when she writes:

The thing that must survive you is not just the record of your practice, but the principles that are the basis of your practice. If in the future, somebody is gonna use that song I sang, they’re gonna have to strip it or at least shift it. I’m glad the principle is there for others to build upon. (1983, 366)

Reagan articulates not only what people laboring for social change need to leave behind, but also what those who inherit their work should expect to receive. That is to say, those of us who are concerned with social and political change should aim to “throw…[ourselves] into the next century,” as she suggests, by leaving our practice and our principles (Reagon 1983, 365). And those of us who are on the receiving end of messages from previous centuries should, at the very least, work to extract the principles that lay therein. To this end, this essay is an act of inheriting. An act of inheriting, as I understand it, attempts to do the work advocated by Reagan of “stripping,” “shifting” and extracting principles from the praxis of those who have left me a record of their lives and work. As an U.S. Black feminist philosopher then, this paper is an act of inheriting a particular vein in U.S. Black feminist thought, i.e. knowing in space.

“Knowing in space,” here, refers to varying conditions for the possibility of social knowledge that can be extracted from Black feminist conceptions of Black women’s oppression in an U.S. context. There are three lessons that can be extracted from U.S Black feminist social theory that outline parameters for social knowledge. They are the following: 1) oppression as a multistable, social phenomenon; 2) part of some Black women’s experiences of oppression in the U.S. concerns the occupation of negative, socio-epistemic space; and 3) due to 1) and 2), addressing oppression will require grappling with an ongoing politics of social spatiality. I claim that these three lessons illuminate three conditions for the possibility of social knowledge. In what follows I will highlight the above three lessons and briefly gesture to several conditions for social knowledge.

There have been and there will continue to be attempts to create metaphors for experiences of oppression where singular analytics fail. Very few feminist and gender scholars are not familiar with critiques from Black feminists on the difficulty of fitting their experience of oppression into categories demarcated by one vector of vulnerability, e.g. gender-based oppression or race-based oppression. From Anna Julia Cooper’s train station (1891-1892) to the Combahee River Collective’s idea of interlocking (1995) to Deborah King’s revision of jeopardy (Beale 1969) with her conception of multiple jeopardy (1988) to Hortense Spillers’ interstices (1984) to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersection (1989) and beyond, there have been attempts to create metaphors capable of capturing experiences of oppression that seem to twist, turn, twirl and jump so as to resist being tracked. That there have been and continue to be attempts to track oppression that is experienced according to multiple aspects of social existence cannot be disputed. However, there seems to be relatively little recognition about what these attempts imply about an overall understanding of oppression itself.

The Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement,” offers a portrait of the rhetorical landscape within which one can recognize tensions in conceptions of oppression that gesture to an illuminating underlying assumption concerning the nature of oppression, i.e. that oppression is a multistable, social phenomenon. The Collective open their famous “Statement” with the call for an:

“Integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face,” (1995, 232).

There are two conceptions of oppression conflicting with one another in this passage. There is oppression defined as multiple, interlocking systems and oppression as a holistic, simultaneous experience. These two conceptions of oppression are not wholly compatible. But that the Collective deploys them one after the other indicates a rather sophisticated overall understanding of oppression that has heretofore gone largely unacknowledged. In what follows, I will outline these two clashing conceptions of oppression and the first lesson from U.S. Black women’s social theory, i.e. oppression is a multistable phenomenon.

According to the earlier cited passage, oppression can be seen to have several characteristics. It is composed of 1) various systems that 2) interlock to create comprehensive wholes. These “wholes” are manifold or varied. This range of descriptors, i.e. systems-based, interlocking, and manifold, can be aligned and realigned a number of ways to gesture to different overall understandings of oppression. The most common reading is to trace the descriptors, systems-based, interlocking, and manifold, to an additive approach to understanding oppressions. This interpretation can hearken to a remnant of critiques of Francis Beale’s “double jeopardy,” which attempts to promote the recognition of the interrelations of race-based and gender-based oppressions, along with a much-overlooked emphasis on class-based oppressions. The jeopardy paradigm would give rise to the use of “triple jeopardy,” to indicate race, class and gender-based oppression and, as some claim, a fourth jeopardy in sexuality-based oppression. Because the jeopardy model grew by “adding-on” other systematic forms of oppression, the jeopardy paradigm is often considered to be an additive approach. This interpretation largely results from placing emphasis on the descriptor, “systems-based.” If oppression is composed of diverse systems of jeopardy that interlock and complicate one another, for example, then oppression, itself, can also be functionalized thus.

Oppression, then, can be seen to function according to diverse systems of jeopardy that interlock and complicate one another. The descriptors: systems-based, interlocking, and manifold, fix oppression as a conglomerate of diverse, discrete systems that represent different and complicated sites of jeopardy according to a functionalization by description. Certainly this kind of reading can be supported by the passage “[we] see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact the major systems of oppression are interlocking,” (Collective 1995, 232). First, the use of the plural term, “oppressions” and, second, the call for “integrative analysis and practice” imply, for some, that the underlying conception of oppression is one where discrete systems, which can be analyzed separately (even if only in theory), are locked together in ways that make sites of jeopardy manifold. This understanding of how oppression is conceptualized in the Collective’s “Statement” is further evidenced by varying remarks throughout the text concerning “sexual oppression” and “race oppression,” to name a few. That these “oppressions” are, at times, separated from a holistic account of oppression is notable and can be found in the text. This has made many content with the system-based conception of oppression most identify with The Combahee River Collective and the jeopardy paradigm.

Though the systems-based conception of oppression is likely the most familiar reading of the Collective’s understanding of “interlocking oppression” and, to a certain extent, the jeopardy paradigm, this is but half of the story of how the term “oppression” is used in the Collective’s “Statement.” It is also the least defensible, insofar as it lends itself to a disintegrative analysis that is done for the sake of an integrative analysis, which may be precisely what the Combahee River Collective, Frances Beale, and many other Black women social theorists in an U.S. context are attempting to compromise due to problematic oversights such a functionalized model of oppression promotes, e.g. not just race, not just gender (Smith 1998). It is fortunate, then, for Black feminist who inherit this work, that this is not the only way oppression is conceptualized in “A Black Feminist Statement.”

The second conception of oppression that is present in the Collective’s “Statement” can be seen to follow from, first, the following passage, “The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives” (1995, 232) and, second, the fact that for the bulk of the essay oppression is invoked not as the plural, “oppressions”, but as a singular term “oppression.” This second conception of oppression, I claim, is experienced-based, not systems based. That is to say, emphasis is put on the simultaneity of one’s experience of oppression that is not easily discernable according to systems. As they write, “we often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously,” (Collective 1995, 234). Simultaneity is used to describe the experience of oppression. And the synthesis of oppression, which hearkening to experience can promise, involves another dimension of oppression that cannot be captured by understanding oppression as interlocking systems.

It is the understanding of oppression as a holistic phenomenon, as experienced-based and not given to discrete systems that can be analyzed separately, that informs the Collective’s call for “identity politics.” Identifying oppression as experience-based, also required harkening to the reality that addressing oppression will need to track possible ranges of experiences of oppression. As one member of The Combahee River Collective recalls:

I think we came up with the term ‘identity politics.’ I never really saw it anywhere else…But what we meant by identity politics was a politics that grew out of our objective material experiences as Black women…So there were basically politics that worked for us…It gave us a way to move, a way to make change. It was not the reductive version that theorists now really criticize. It was not being simplistic in saying I am Black and you are not. That is not what we were doing” (Harris 2009, 28)

Understanding oppression as outlined by one’s range of experiences with oppression, changes the formulation of oppression from ‘discrete systems, which can be analyzed separately, and yet are locked together in ways that make sites of jeopardy manifold’ to a range of experiences that can condition one’s life according to simultaneous jeopardizations. Jeopardy, a noun, turns into jeopardize, a verb. This latter conception is compatible with Beale’s usage of 'jeopardize,' as her primary deployment of the term “jeopardy” is the verb “jeopardize.” Oppression can be understood, then, according to ranges of jeopardization and the range of one’s jeopardization can often be tracked according to one’s “read-able” social identity in a given geo-political space. What is important to note, is oppressions (plural) transforms into oppression (singular), for the Collective.

One of the differences between the “integrative analysis” of a system-based conception of oppression and the “synthesis” of an experience-based conception of oppression lies in one’s reasons to deploy either conception. A systems-based conception of oppression can be used to find bridges across different experiences of oppression, but it contributes precious little to comprehending ranges of jeopardization. It does much to obscure such ranges. An experience-based conception of oppression can aid in identifying ranges of jeopardization, but often obscures sites of coalition. This is not a simple difference. Those invested in an experience-based conception of oppression often think that sites of coalition are merely illusions, whereas those persuaded by a system-based conception of oppression often find the identification of difference superfluous. These positions are not easy to reconcile. And it is not clear that reconciliation is a necessary goal. Rather, as is evidenced by The Combahee River Collective’s text, they can be allowed to exist simultaneously; side-by-side, clashing horribly at times, but present in a way that begs a philosophical reading of an operative assumption concerning the nature of oppression that underwrites deploying two clashing conceptions of oppression.

The Collective’s attempt to examine the “multilayered texture of Black women’s lives,” takes place among conceptions of oppression that they both utilize and challenge. They complicate the either system or experience dichotomy that so often plagues reconstructions of Black feminist thought by refusing to chose one conception over another. They challenge a system-based conceptions by identifying that their experiences of oppression do not fold nicely into neat analytics, while affirming the necessity of systems-accounts as Socialist interested in the articulation of “the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives (Collective 1995, 235).

The systems-based theory can “work” when we are distinctly referring to systems of oppression, and they exist. But they fail miserably to track the range of jeopardization one faces given different read-able social identities. They affirm an experience based conception of oppression when they forward “we know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression that is neither solely racial and solely sexual” (Collective 1995, 234); even while they proclaim the need to consider system-based analyses (235). What does this intentional conceptual clashing imply about an overall understanding of oppression? I claim, that The Combahee River Collective can be seen to have operated with an understanding that oppression is a multistable social phenomenon.

In its simplest formation, an assumption concerning oppression invoked in The Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement,” is oppression is complicated. It admits of no privilegeable conceptions that do not also obscure through the privileging. Oppression is a multistable social phenomenon. What does it mean to say that oppression is multistable? Taking oppression as a multistable phenomenon is to say that it admits of an open range of “topographic” possibilities (Ihde 1977, 77). Oppression in a given society, on the ground, will have multiple ways one can understand it, and these multiple ways will have a certain “apodicticity” (Ihde 1977, 71). That is to say, one’s certitude that oppression simply ‘is’ a certain way or originates from such and such a place, or can be understood according to such and such an orientation can be experientially fulfilled time and again. This is not simply to say that we see what we want to see, though this is certainly part of it. Rather, oppression admits of a number of interpretations and a number of manifestations and a number of conceptions. How a multistable phenomena is interpreted in space will depend on a variety of factors, not the least of which will be one’s “perspectival perception,” one’s goals (Ihde 2009, 12), including, but not limited to, cultural inheritances, cognitive commitments, and embodied location. The way oppression is perceived will also depend on its social effect and one’s relations to it (Frye 1983).

It is no surprise that a middle-class, able-bodied, heterosexual, Christian, English-speaking, Black man in the United States whose family is from the United States (or have been here for several generations) might identify race as ‘the’ primary form of oppression and privilege a systems-based conception of oppression. It also hardly surprising that I cannot make sense of what it would mean to be oppressed as Black or as a Woman without having a “conceptual” difficulty akin to the difficulty inherent in resolving the mind/body problem. Where does the “raced” part of me end and the “woman” part of me begin? And how do they interact? When attempting to comprehend the range of jeopardization I face as a Black Woman in the United States, I privilege an experiential-based conception, but not in all cases and not consistently. This gestures to an aspect of oppression that is largely overlooked, though not, I would claim, by The Combahee River Collective. There is simply oppression; and it is multistable admitting of a range of conceptualizations, functionalizations, and manifestations.

I believe this is what many of the theories of oppression in Black women’s writings in the U.S. have been aiming to highlight. Anna Julia Cooper’s “Woman vs. the Indian” (1891-1892), Fannie Barrier Williams’ “The Colored Girl” (1905), Frances Beale’s, “Double Jeopardy” (1969), Pauli Murray’s “The Liberation of Black Women” (1970), Audre Lorde’s “There is No Hierarchy of Oppression” (originally published in 1983, 2009), Deborah King’s “Multiple Jeopardy” (1988), Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Gender” (1989), Carole Boyce Davies’s Black Women, Writing and Identity (1994), Carla Peterson’s ‘Doers of the Word’ (1995), Patricia Hill Collins’ Fighting Words (1998), Valerie Smith’s not just race not just gender: Black Feminist Readings (1998) and Kimberly Springer’s Living for the Revolution (2005) all of these Black women (and many more) have attempted to articulate some metaphor for oppression that can signify the complex ways oppression jeopardizes the lives of Black women, and yet leave room for the realization that oppression is a multistable, social phenomenon. Unfortunately, the clashing conceptions of oppression in these texts are often read as a lack of theoretical sophistication, instead of resting on an important insight into the nature of oppression itself. Namely that oppression holds within its structure the ability to manifest differently at different times to different people.

Identifying an orientation that oppression is multistable within The Combahee River Collective’s clashing conceptions of oppression is not mere conjecture on my part. Identity politics is underwritten by a realization of a real danger in not owning one’s readable social identity and how it affects one’s understanding of oppression. They write concerning identity politics:

We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves…to be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.” (Collective 1995, 234)

This passage draws attention to the often cited and still under appreciated statement that “all the women are white, all the Blacks are men.” This is not a statement of fact. It is a statement of the power to determine public narratives of gender-based or race-based oppression. And that narrative is experientially confirmable for certain portions of those populations, but they led to misreadings and misrecognition of the range of jeopardizations faced by Black women. This is not a surprise, analytics of oppression do work to obscure experiences of oppression complicated by complex social identities. So-called ill-meaning Black men or evil white women do not prompt the misreadings, although there may have been some. Rather, the nature of oppression as multistable encourages such overdetermination, but it also demands more open-ended approaches. This is where I situate the clashing conceptions of oppression in “A Black Feminist Statement.” As a performance of open-endedness required to acknowledge the multistable nature of oppression so as to resist practices of misreading encouraged by the multistability of oppression itself. This indicates one conditions for the possibility of social knowledge. That is to say, the multistability of social phenomena demands open-ended approaches to knowing social facts.

The next lesson from Black women’s social theory I will identify can be posited as a way to answer the question of why the clashing conception of oppression in “The Black Feminist Collective” was largely ignored and, through reductive critiques of identity politics, erased.

In her book, Invisibility Blues, Michele Wallace argues one of the primary values of Black Women’s literature is its ability to render “the negative” presence of Black women substantial (1990, 228). Claiming that Black women are the “other of the other,” Wallace will, I think, appropriately identify a “fear” of a kind of theory in some Black feminist intellectual traditions that is a response to the ways “abstract” theorizing about oppression has rendered “invisible” Black women’s experiences of oppression (1990).[1] Black women, in Wallace’s estimation, exist in varying states of negation fostered by, in part; the ways Black women’s experiences have been overwritten with narratives where they no longer recognize themselves. Wallace, here, is picking up on a common topic in many U.S. Black women’s social and political writings that dates back to, at least, Maria Stewart (1832).

The epistemic violence that often hinders one’s ability to “make sense” of claims made by and about Black women has been heavily remarked upon. From Fannie Barrier Williams’ pronouncement that Black women are “unknowable” (1905) to Deborah King’s articulation of Black women’s theoretical invisibility (1988, 43-45), to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s description of how Black women can be “theoretically erased” (1989, 139). To shed light on Wallace’s point and this understanding of Black women’s “problematic” occupation of socio-epistemic space in an U.S. context, I will articulate Fannie Barrier Williams’ claim that Black women are “unknowable.” Williams articulates two fronts on which Black women are unknowable and, then, turns to offer an account of what is at stake in being unknowable.

At the turn of the 20^th century, Williams explains that Black women were unknowable ‘qua woman’ and ‘qua race.’ In her article, “The Woman’s Part in the Man’s Business,” she writes:

The American Negro woman is the most interesting woman in the country…She has no history, no traditions, no race ideals, no inherited resources, no established race character. She is the only woman in America who is almost unknown. (Williams 1907, 544)

To say that Black women, in an U.S. context, were almost ‘unknown’ was not to indicate that there were no stereotypical images of Black women in existence. Williams is well aware of negative portrayals of Black women as she writes numerous articles defending Black women in the face of transient, public opinions. However, what provoked Black women’s general ‘unknowability’ was a paucity of resources within “fixed public opinion” that one could draw upon when interpreting Black women (Williams 1900/2007, 54). I take “fixed public opinion” to be something akin to a ‘social imaginary.’ Lorraine Code explains that a social imaginary is a “conceptual analytic resource” that refers to:

Implicit but effective systems of images, meanings, metaphors, and interlocking explanations-expectations woven through a social-political order, which people, in specific periods and cultural-geographical climates enact their knowledge and subjectivities and craft their self understandings. (Code 2006)

The concept of a social imaginary points to the ways social perceptions are influenced and the underlying “understandings” that fashion them. Black women, according to Williams, could not be ‘known’ via available prevailing social narratives. And though Williams was aware that Black women were subject to social stereotypes, those stereotypes were only one part of the problems Black women faced. She explained that a real problem for Black women also followed from a lack of available resources within established social imaginaries useful for understanding the social uplift of Black women.

According to Williams, Black women were situated in a peculiar place. They were not wholly subject to prevailing narratives around race, nor were they wholly subject to prevailing narratives around womanhood. Williams explained, in her article “The Colored Girl,” “Man’s instinctive homage at the shrine of womankind draws a line of color, which places…[the colored girl] forever outside its mystic circle,” (1905, 400). She believed that Black women had no male defenders and no prose or literature written to sing the virtues of Black women. It may seem superfluous to say that there are no poems and literature written in homage to Black women. But what Williams appears to be drawing attention to is a kind of negative socio-epistemic status that is marked by social absence, and not a masked presence. Where Ralph Ellison will express eloquently through the voice of nameless narrator of The Invisible Man, “I am invisible, you understand, simply because people refuse to see me…it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass,” (1947/1995, 3). Williams expresses a similar edict by indicating ‘she is invisible, you understand, because there is no way for her to be seen.’

It is not clear that Williams sees her position as being surrounded by mirrors of any kind. The mirrors are all positioned to reflect other groups, distorting their images, but leaving her image in darkness. So Williams, when speaking of social uplift, expresses the need to address the “negative” socio-epistemic space Black women exist in within US social imaginaries. Let me suggest the ‘liminal,’ outsider within status many Black feminist have identified around Black women as a social group within the U.S. parallels Williams’ conception of the ‘unknowability’ of Black women (Collins 1986; Peterson 1993).

Now there is much about this account that is dated. First, there are and were Black male defenders of Black women. There have also been great strides in cultural production by and about Black women in the U.S. However, fixating on these clearly dated features misses a larger commonality that Williams shares with contemporary Black feminist scholars, like Wallace. What survives the cultural production phases of self-determination is an ongoing identification of “erasure.” What a paucity in fixed public imaginaries harkens to is, at base, a struggle for recognition that cannot be satisfied with “controlling images” or “stereotypes,” if they are also transient. The problem that Williams and Wallace identify in common is being the “other of an other,” which is obviously not a reduction to the same. It is a relegation to a null, transient space of signification. A dynamic space, where one can construct Black women as the welfare queen or the mammy; the diseased maid or the emasculating matriarch; whatever is necessary to shine a negative light on Blackness and, quite possibly more specifically, on Black men.

The effect of being unknowable is hardly limited to an inability to be detected within “fixed” social imaginaries. For Williams, there was a more profound effect of, what Wallace calls, Black women’s varying states of negation. Williams writes:

That the term ‘colored girl’ is almost a term of reproach in the social life of America is all too true; she is not known and hence not believed in she belongs to a race that is best designated by the term ‘problem’ and she lives beneath the shadow of that problem which envelops and obscures her. (italics added, 1905, 400)

Again, contrast this quote with a question made by W.E.B. Du Bois, who opens his book, The Souls of Black Folks, with the question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” (1995, 43). Williams situates herself, and other Black women, by asking the question, ‘How does it feel to exist beneath the shadow of a problem?’ Du Bois, a Black man subject to semi-permanent race ideas and race character, can have the state of embodying “a problem.” Williams, on the other hand, as a Black woman is denied that ‘dubious’ privilege. Williams recognized the ability to positively “embody” an identity, held by both white women and Black men, as a marker of status. What status you might ask? I want to suggest that deep-seeded ‘distortions’ actually offer a positive, socio-epistemic status. Positive, here, simply means social presence or broad; detectability. She is not alone in this observation. Kimberlé Crenshaw will make much of anti-discrimination cases where Black women are seen as too special a class to be subject to anti-discrimination correctives either due to the fact that they were not discriminated against because they were Black or because they were women, but because they are Black women, for example (Crenshaw 1989). This kind of erasure, which Deborah King calls “being socialized out of existence,” is precisely what Williams is attempting to draw attention to in 1905.

Recent books, like Melissa Harris-Perry’s Sister Citizen, highlight the problem of being “socialized out of existence” or, as Wallace prescribes, existing in varying state of negation as an ongoing problem for many Black women in the U.S (Wallace 1990; Harris-Perry 2011; King 1988, 45). This is not an accident. There are conditions for the possibility of social presence, i.e. the ability to resist Williams’ unknowability, and they concern occupying positive, socio-epistemic space. Lesson two, then, is simply that erasures are more easily affected when one exists in varying state of negation, even if (and, quite possibly, especially if) that negation is theoretically inscribed so as to affect social imaginaries. Positive, socio-epistemic status or the ability to be detected in space via social narratives, as I understand it, is a conditions for the possibility of social knowledge insofar as it is a condition for the possibility of being detected as a knower. As Williams explains, being afforded negative, socio-epistemic status compromises one’s believability at varying levels of epistemic engagement.

If oppression is multistable (given to perspectival perceptions on the ground) and part of Black women’s experience of oppression follows from inhabiting a negative, socio-epistemic space, then Black women’s liberation will need to address far more than material concerns and far more than our own material concerns. One must also address the politics of spatiality that the multistability of oppression and the necessity of positive, socio epistemic space highlight. Addressing problems that result from the multistable oppression and the occupation of negative, socio-epistemic space would require radical reconceptualizations of how we occupy space as part of a liberation agenda.

The call for this kind of reconceptualization can be seen in Anna Julia Cooper’s 1891 article, “Woman vs. the Indians.” Cooper offers an anecdote aimed at clarifying her position as a Black woman in the U.S. She talks of frequenting a train rest stop, with a main foyer area and two clearly labeled rooms. One dingy, lonely room was labeled “FOR LADIES.” And another equally depressing room was labeled “FOR COLORED PEOPLE.” Cooper briefly describes her confusion. To which room did she belong? The Ladies’ room? The “Colored” People’s room? What room should she occupy and at what costs? Cooper describes her awareness of the puzzle presented her when she simply stands in place and asks the reader, “What a field for a missionary woman?” (1891-1892, 95). The irony of her question should not be lost. One of the points of Cooper’s story is that there is no field at all for a Black woman, missionary or otherwise. The marked failure to find “space” where one belongs speaks to many of the concerns raised in Black feminist thought. Let me suggest, then, the almost rabid focus on “homes” and “home life” as a strategy for social uplift within U.S. Black feminist thought is not indicative of an internalization of the ‘cult of womanhood’ ideals, nor is it an outgrowth of some imagined ‘bourgeois’ self-deception.[2]

What Black feminist social theorists like Williams and Cooper identified was that Black women had no clear spatial placement. This observation has been reaffirmed and extended in the 20^th and, now, 21^st centuries to also include an absence of theoretical placement (Crenshaw 1989, 139). The spatial nature of the descriptions Cooper and Williams offer of Black women situation with respect to oppression should not go unnoticed. For Williams, Black women were ‘beneath,’ ‘beyond,’ and ‘outside’ of US social imaginaries. For Cooper, Black women simply did not have a ‘field’ or space that lent to interpreting Black women’s place in American social landscapes. This will be extended by Kelly Cogan-Gehr, 2011, with her account of the displacement and obfuscation of some U.S. Black feminist thought in light of important developments in transnational feminism (Coogan-Gehr 2011). Understanding these senses of ‘displacement’ are key to understanding how oppression is perceived and experienced by many Black women. Seeing a ‘place to be’ as a significant social uplift is not a result of some ‘womanly’ disposition, nor is it merely a distancing of oneself from some conceptions of transnational projects. It is, rather, the product of a view of oppression from here.

Coogan-Gehr, in her 2011 Signs article, “The Politics of Race in U.S. Feminist Scholarship: An Archaeology,” coined the push for locating spaces “where no one is prey” as a seizing of territory. She writes: “Many Black feminists are committed to a politics of location in the form of seizing territory even as they are keenly aware of the impermanence and imperfection of specific locations, geopolitical or otherwise” (Coogan-Gehr 2011, 101). These efforts to seize territory can be linked to identifying occupying negative, socio-epistemic space, as part of some Black women’s experiences of oppression. The need to find space to resist or a place where one can be recognized can be seen as direct measures for addressing the occupation of negative, socio-epistemic space and, as such, is an attempt to grapple with the politics of spatiality. As Coogan-Gehr writes:

Safe space encompasses a strategy of resistance in which Black women physically locate themselves in a space – such as a home of a friend, a church, or a community center – strictly with other Black women. Ideally safe spaces allow Black women the freedom to think, feel, act, and speak in ways not disciplined…through the capillaries of state surveillance. Despite the impermanence of safe spaces, it is through them that Black women seize territory into which capillaries of the state surveillance cannot reach and grant themselves power to freely code and give meaning to their thought feelings and actions. (2011, 101)

The claim that space still needs to be seized for Black women, according to some U.S. Black feminists, follows from the view of oppression from here, which is itself attending to a politics of spatiality.

The assumption that oppression is multistable demands attention be paid to one’s socio-epistemic location that gives rise to how one understands social phenomena; the idea that pervasive social narratives serve the backdrop of knowability and knowers; and the idea that a condition for the possibility of social knowledge is physical space to “freely code and give meaning” are all conditions for the possibility of social knowledge that can be extracted from the three lessons from Black women’s social theory I have highlighted here. How we occupy space, how we known in space, and how we exist in space are all conditions for the possibility of social knowledge.

In conclusion, I have tried to briefly highlight three lessons I have learned from reading Black feminist social theory. They are 1) oppression is multistable, 2) some Black women’s identify as part of their oppression in the U.S. inhabiting negative, socio-epistemic space, and 3) any liberation project that does not address a politics of spatiality will inevitably fail to address a large portion of some Black women’s experiences of oppression in the U.S. And the three corresponding conditions for the possibility of social knowledge gestured at here include: 1) knowing social phenomena require attention be paid to one’s socio-epistemic location, 2) positive socio-epistemic status is a condition for the possibility of registering as a knower, and 3) physical space for social cognition is brute condition for the possibility of social knowledge. These three conditions, in my estimation, can begin an account of an U.S. Black feminist epistemology.

Kristie Dotson is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. Professor Dotson researches in women of color feminist philosophy, epistemology (particularly testimony and feminist epistemology), and critical philosophy of race. She edited with Robert Bernasconi a series of books entitled Race, Hybridity, and Miscegenation. Representative publications include: “In Search of Tanzania,” Southern Journal of Philosophy (46: Supp, 2008), “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy (26:2, 2011), and “Moi, Féministe Noire: Pour Qui Je Me Prends?” Diogenes (235-236, 2011), and “A Cautionary Tale,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies (33:1, 2012).

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> [1] Here Wallace is echoing an earlier, more notorious, rejection of theory that follows from Barbara Christian’s “The Race for Theory” (1988, 76-77). Christian’s appeal for “concrete” theory is not due to a lack of so-called “philosophical sophistication,” but rather to a realization that in “abstract theorizing” Black women get hurt. Her call to “concrete” theorizing is call for a reorientation in practice and worldviews so that Black and “Third World” women’s experience can be accounted for (Christian 1988, 76-77, 2007, 227).

> [2] For Black feminist who emphasize the importance of ‘home’ for social uplift, see (Smith 1983), (hooks 1990), (Omolade 1994), (Peterson 1995), and (Tate 2003).