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Chapter 14
A Thinking Margin
The Womanist Movement as Critical Cognitive Praxis
M. Shawn Copeland
The mind of the man and the mind of the woman is the same, but this business of living makes women use their minds in ways that men don't even have to think about.^1
My folk ... have always been a race for theory-though more in the form of hieroglyph, a written figure which is both sensual and abstract, beautiful and communicative.^2
As a group, African American women remain underappreciated as critical thinkers, that is, as intellectuals who can assess astutely, reliably, and com- prehensively the breakdowns and collapses in religion and society as well as generate creative and plausible alternatives. More than a decade ago, Michele Wallace bemoaned the condition of black women thinkers, con- curring with French feminist critics that "we are all functioning sym- bolically as phallocentric, ethnocentric, and logocentric subjects, in other words as 'white men [with] black women ... the least convincing in this role, the least trustworthy."3 Thus, a certain poignancy characterizes black women's intellectual positioning: Even those scholars with whom we share the periphery, other outsiders committed to human flourishing, suspect our intellectual ability. Put differently, womanists-theologians, ethicists, scholars, and cultural critics-fight a never-ending battle against the hegemony of the pseudo-universality of a deracinated male posited as the Western standard of normativity. Since the black woman's involuntary arrival in the West, her body and
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mind have been relegated to the margin, pressed to and beyond the limit. Down-pressed, she became a marginated being-living, breathing, bleed- ing, thinking, struggling, moving, and loving on the margin. She was re- duced to an "exotic" outer edge against which men, white and black, tested physical and sexual power. Her body's heartbreaking fertility was manipu- lated to adjust the planter's margin of profit; her soul's longing for expres- sion was thwarted against desperate and mimetic preference for the black male. Pressed to the margin, embodying outsider status in society and reli- gion, black women became liminal. Standing outside conventional points of social, cultural, and religious reference, black women have learned to think on the margins, to think clearly and quickly before the blunt force
of ersatz-reality. Black women intellectuals have taken up Zora Neale
Hurston's keen razor-sharp oyster knife to cut through thick stuff, to ap- prehend and appropriate their own subjectivity in search of truth.
Alice Walker's definition of womanist captures the intensity, responsibil- ity, and accountability of the vocation of black women situated on the
margins with the denotation "serious."4 The notion serious connotes a
perspective or stance that is resolute or "strong-minded, unflinching, tena-
cious, persevering"; critical or "essential, pivotal, radical"; responsible or
"far-sighted, reasonable, trustworthy."
To be a serious thinking margin means to take up a critical cognitive
praxis. The phrase cognitive praxis denotes the dynamic activity of know-
ing: questioning patterns and the sometimes jagged-edge of experience (including biological, psychological, social, religious, cultural, aesthetic); testing and probing possible answers; marshaling evidence and weighing it against cultural codes and signs, against imperious and subjugated truths; risking judgment; taking up the struggle. Such knowledge roots its ac- countability, its authoritative control of meaning and value in the cogni- tive, moral, and religious authenticity of the identity of poor, excluded, and despised black women. 6 Womanist critical cognitive praxis yields not only concrete embodied relatedness to truth, but a metaphysical one as well. For the human mind wants to know and wants to know that what it
knows is real. But what is real is not necessarily what is "out-there," for the
kind of "measure and standard of objectivity" that "out-there," empirical and observable represents is but a form of naive realism. 7 Insofar as wom- anists enact a critical cognitive praxis in which the «fulfilling conditions are data of sense or data of consciousness;' then what womanists know is real, is being. 8
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tive in morals. The position I advocate locates womanist foundations not in propositions but in persons, in critically inquiring, thinking, probing, reflecting, judging, deciding, acting black women. Womanists are their own foundations. When black women critically in- quire, probe, reflect, judge, decide, challenge, and act in service of truth, they constitute themselves as critical knowers (and doers). Womanist crit- ical cognitive praxis, as a mode of critical consciousness oriented toward emancipatory struggle (personal, communal, and social transformation), can trace its genesis to the earliest actuated meanings of resistance by cap- tured and enslaved African women. As a mode of critical self-consciousness, black women's cognitive praxis emphasizes the dialectic between oppression, conscious reflection on ex- perience of that oppression, and action to resist and eliminate it. Thus, as an authentic intellectual movement, womanist analysis originates in ask- ing and answering serious questions; in grappling with human existence confronted by the mix of greed, cruelty, and desire in struggle for life and love. Hence, black women know the meaning of human existence as capi- tal, labor, collateral, medium of exchange, object of property. But black women also know themselves as subjects, as thinkers, as knowers, as ac- tors. The matrix of domination responds to human agency: the struggle of black women suggests that there is choice and power to think, to theorize, to act-mindfully, seriously. Womanists are their own foundations. This position welcomes Toni Morrison's insistence that the Ancestors are foundations. 14 We should re- call that Alice Walker puts forward the definition of womanist in the con- text of remembering and honoring the Foremothers. Indeed, her search for a ground on which to stand and from within which to grow leads to and through our mothers' gardens. Here, audacious women tend and prune the trees of the knowledge of good and evil, of truth and life; plant and nurture magnificent flowers. The wisdom they possess grows from experience and struggle. Walker describes these mothers and grandmoth- ers and great -grandmothers in lyrical, yet poignant language as
exquisite butterflies trapped in an evil honey, toiling away their lives in an era, a century that did not acknowledge them except as «the mule of the world:' They dreamed dreams that no one knew-not even themselves, in any coherent fashion -and saw visions no one could understand .... They forced their minds to desert their bodies and their striving spirits sought to rise, like frail whirlwinds from the hard red day. And when those
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frail whirlwinds fell, in scattered particles, upon the ground, no one mourned. IS
Yet the Foremothers persisted in their dreams and "waited to pass on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see."16 They handed on to their daughters «a legacy of respect for all that illuminates and cherishes life, respect for the possibilities-and the will to grasp them ... respect for strength [and] love ofbeauty."
The release of subjugated knowledge constitutes a serious, even danger- ous, activity. To question ideas and circumstances, to probe and under- stand and evaluate and judge those ideas and circumstances, begins a first and crucial moral step toward authentic liberation. Yet liberation springs not only from what human persons know, but also from their actions or showing what they truly are-human beings. Womanist critical cognitive praxis slices open the brutal oppressions of sexism, racism, classism, and heterosexism in order to advance being human and human flourishing. Womanist analysis is not idealist, believing that to know the good is to choose it; rather, womanist critical cognitive praxis concludes in decision that leads to action, to transformation in religion and society. Audre Lorde warned us that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They will allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they
will never enable us to bring about genuine change. "18 Tools for genuine
change or transformation include nurture and interdependency; the ac- ceptance, understanding, and appreciation of difference; and friendship.
Womanists share among themselves as well as with other subaltern schol- ars a fluid constellation of cognitive and religious commitments, method- ological and theoretical practices. Over the past two decades, womanists have developed a wide-ranging and rich conceptual vocabulary that medi- ates meaning, even as those meanings may be contested and require nego- tiation and refinement. In considering the meanings of these nine notions -body, canon, death, know, mind, race, sass, survival, transgress-my hope is to suggest something of their protean meanings, repetitive and multilayered resonances; to suggest the curve and flow of the grammar 0f the womanist movement.
By sorting, labeling, and disciplining different types of human bodies,
the notion of race simultaneously constructs, signifies, and symbolizes so-
cial conflicts and interests. 19 To understand race as a social construct is
232 M. S HAW NCO PEL AND
between opinion and knowledge, nor because they reject the possibility of an objective trans culturally valid rational standard. 21 On the contrary,
black women know (in mind and body) just what it means to be the object
of relativized opinion or stereotype, what it means to be excluded from or be regarded as the conspicuous exception within the community of ratio- nal discourse. Rejecting knowledge grounded in empiricism and ideal- ism, womanists advance a critical realist way of knowing, in which human experience can be interrogated and differentiated seriously; in which dif- fering and analogous experiences, questions, and judgments are engaged and weighed in the service of understanding reality and truth; and in which knowledge exists for the creation and development of the common human good as well as individual human liberation. 22 As a serious thinking margin, womanists have adopted an archaeologi- cal approach to canon formation. Digging back and deep into black his- tory, literature, and other expressive forms of culture, womanist scholars have unearthed the bodies of unknown or forgotten black women and bodies of unknown or forgotten texts. Katie Cannon brings the writing of black women's texts and the reading of black women's bodies together when she cites African American literary critic Mae Henderson, who iden- tifies ((black women's bodies as texts:'23 Thus, the crucial contribution that womanist analysis makes to canon (re )formation is the heretofore ne- glected subject of the experience of black women. This does not mean that womanist theologians, for example, overlook Friedrich Schleiermacher or Karl Barth or Bernard Lonergan or Aristotle or Plato just because they may be dead white men. Rather, womanists take
the survival and flourishing of oppressed, excluded, and despised humanity
(children, women, and men of all races and classes) as criteria for evalu- ation in reading texts. As Katie Cannon explains, ((Canon formation is a way of establishing new and larger contexts of experience within which African American women can attend to the disparity between sources of oppression and sources of liberation."24 Insights that potentially enrich or correct our understanding of what is good and true can never be ignored. Reading in this way, womanists disentangle valuable and effective insights from thorny and ineffectual ones. Moreover, through this critical reading, womanists not only critique and (re)shape the canons of their disciplines but also rethink, revise, and transform whole areas in the common fund of human knowledge. Another and crucial way in which womanists subvert the canon is through teaching. Education, bell hooks insists, must be the practice of
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freedom, to teach in this way is to teach to transgress. Transgression en- tails ((movement against and beyond boundaries."25 Transgressive teaching leads students to grapple with boundaries that constrict cognitive and moral growth; encourages them to explore new intellectual terrain; and models for them compassionate solidarity with the poor in the advance of justice. 26 Transgressive teaching grasps and communicates the difference between life and death. Another form of transgression is sass. Sass is the use of mother wit and verbal dexterity to resist insult or assault. It denotes impudent, uppity speech; sharp, cutting back talk-sharp, cutting talk thrown at the back. Sass is a gift from the Ancestors. Enslaved black women took up verbal warfare in order to regain and secure self-esteem, to gain psychological distance, to tell the truth, and, sometimes, to protect against sexual as- sault. 27 The word ((sass" derives from the bark of the poisonous West Afri- can sassy tree. Deconcocted and mixed with certain other barks, sass was used in ritual ordeals to test, punish, or absolve those accused of witch- craft. For our enslaved Foremothers, sass was a ready defense that allowed them to ((return a portion of the poison the master ... offered."28 The sass is strong and threatening in the lines of a song women cutters sang in the Louisiana cane fields: ((Rains come wet me/Sun come dry me/Stay back, boss man/Don't come nigh me." These nine terms-body, canon, death, know, mind, race, sass, survival, transgress-form part of a large and complex conceptual vocabulary that overlaps discussion in other fields, including anthropology, epistemology, literary criticism, philosophy, sociology, Africana and post-colonial stud- ies. This chapter has attempted to interpret and engage some of the no- tions and terms pertinent to womanist cognitive praxis, and what has been accomplished is by no means definitive or exhaustive. My basic con- cern here was to turn a light on womanist cognitive praxis and to demon- strate its necessity in the realization of our dreams.
NOT E S
- John Langston Gwaltney, Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 33.
- Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory;' in Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras, ed. Gloria Anzaldua (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990), 336.
- Michelle Wallace, Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (London: Verso, 1990),7.
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With Patricia Hill Collins, I suggest that womanist knowledge is neither "naIve:' nor incapable of "unanimity:' in her Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Con- sciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 29 1ll^ · 2.
- Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 8.
- Cannon, ''Appropriation and Reciprocity in the Doing of Womanist Eth- ics:' in Katie's Canon, 135.
- Toni Morrison, "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation:' in Black Wom- en Writers, 1950-1980, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor Press, 1984), 344-345.
- Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, 232.
- Ibid., 232, 240.
- Ibid., 241-242, 243.
- Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House:' in Sister Outsider, 112 (author's italics).
- Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55.
- Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ambiguous Adventure (1962; New York: Collier Books, 1969), cited in Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986; London: James Curry/Heinemann, 1989), 9n. 10,32.
- Joseph Wagner, "The Trouble with Multiculturalism:' Soundings 77, 3- (Fall/Winter 1994): 410.
- Joy James, "Teaching Theory, Talking Community:' 118-135, esp. 133, in Spirit, Space, and Survival: African American Women in (White) Academe, ed. Joy James and Ruth Farmer (New York: Routledge, 1993).
- Cannon, "Womanist Perspectival Discourse and Canon Formation:' in Katie's Canon, 74.
- Ibid., 76.
- bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 12.
- Ibid., 13-22.
- See Joanne M. Braxton, Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).
- Ibid., 30, 31.
- Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 25, 26.
