Black Feminist Epistemology or Bust: Challenging White Masculinist Thought-Models in Scientific Inquiry
The knowledge validation process allows the domination of a normative thought-model for understanding reality. The realist assumptions embedded historically within the social sciences have as their goal the “. . . re-represent[ation] [of] either ideas and objects, words and things, sentences and states of affairs, or theories and the world (West, 1999, p. 190). West’s (1999) critical opinion finds the re-depicting of reality in a quest for obtaining a true copy is indicative of something other than “human social practice serving as the final court of appeal determining what is and what we out to believe” (p. 190). Consequently, in Black feminist thought there is over awareness of they ways in which Eurocentric epistemologies or normative thought-models are legitimized within knowledge validation processes (Hill-Collins, 2000, p. 253).
Within American social institutions, modes of inquiry must reflect a particular political and epistemological tradition (Hill-Collins, 2000, p. 253). For hooks (1989) and Hill-Collins (1989) conventional inquiry is controlled by powerful White men; hence, they control the knowledge validation process and what counts as truth. Because they must adhere to larger group normatives, such as those of culture and society, there are taken-for-granted knowledge claims that are exclusionary. As a minoritized group within a White majority, Black women’s knowledge is not taken as commonsense or as the taken-for-granted knowledge that fits the sensibilities of the majority. Moreover, as objectivity equals rationality, knowledge, truth and understanding the knowledge claims of White men are viewed as more viable in scientific inquiry. Encountering the world objectively is a perspective that defines how White masculinist science has grappled with reality for centuries (Seshadri-Crooks, 2000). On the other hand, subjectivity is viewed as irrational and suffering from a severe lack of higher understanding (Wright, 1997, p. 117-118). Black feminism is opposed because of its reliance on subjectivity, limited research base and perhaps its exclusionary thought-model. Black feminism is suppressed within the social sciences and is discredited as illegitimate within Eurocentric or Western philosophies of knowledge. It seems, however, that Black women have always been excluded, deemed as unfit, or completely misrepresented by the normative model of scientific inquiry within the social sciences.