Black Feminist Epistemology or Bust: Challenging White Masculinist Thought-Models in Scientific Inquiry
This essay is in staunch opposition the epistemological backdrop as set forth. United States Black feminism challenges a realist epistemology and philosophical position (Hill-Collins, 1989, 2000; hooks, 1981). The distinct epistemology of Black feminism is opposed to ahistorical objective scientific inquiry in the social sciences, critically addresses the Eurocentric knowledge making/validation and acknowledges, disapprovingly, the exclusionary philosophical tradition upon which scientific inquiry is based. Consequently, Black Feminism offers a new tradition in addressing the nature of knowledge and Black women’s role in establishing it.
Black feminist thought is an epistemology that “reflects the distinctive themes of African-American women’s experiences” (Hill-Collins, 2000, p. 251). It is predicated upon the standpoint of Black women and provides “primacy to concrete lived experience as a criterion of knowledge and meaning” (Houston & Davis, 2002, p.5). The central premise of Black feminism acknowledges the history of interlocking and interdependent oppressions of race, gender, and class faced by Black women in the United States (Houston & Davis, 2002, p.5). This is in direct opposition to the inadequate ways in which scientific inquiry, namely social science (through realist paradigms), has attended to a history of subjugation and its influence on Black women’s experience of the world (Hill-Collins, 2000, p. 252). The inadequacy lies in scientific inquiry that seeks to “ . . . destroy contradictions or differences in reality or in history, culture, or social life,” such as realism within the social sciences (Wright, 1997, p. 67). This homogenization, of course, is conducted by a distanced and dispassionate scientist who relies on abstract knowledge and claims bias-free research. This way of gathering knowledge has grave effects on an already marginalized group of people, like Black women. Black feminism runs counter to scientific realist claims of gathering objective generalizable knowledge through an, additionally, objective form of scientific reasoning.