Black Feminist Epistemology or Bust: Challenging White Masculinist Thought-Models in Scientific Inquiry
Black women have been cast as morally and intellectually inferior through what hooks (1981) calls a “racist social science” emanating from a racist history of Black subjugation. And even though there is a growing contention about the use of scientific realism in social science and the level to which it yields viable knowledge, social science researchers are still effected by the need to adhere to the dominant thought-model that legitimates research and knowledge claims (Rosenberg, 1995). Social science researchers do utilize a realist orientation and the effects are disastrous in studies of Black women. hooks discussed in detail how the disparaging myth of the Black matriarch emerged within society through social science research within a realist tradition.
White male scholars who examined the black family by attempting to see in what ways it resembled the white family structure were confident that their data was not biased by their own personal prejudices against women assuming an active role in family decision-making. But it must be remembered that these white males were educated in an elite institutional world that excluded both black people and many white women, institutions that were both racist and sexist. Consequently, when they observed black families, they chose to see the independence, will power, and initiative of black women as an attack on the masculinity of black men. Their sexism blinded them to the obvious positive benefits to both black men and women that occurred when black females assumed an active role, [especially in a racially oppressive social system] (hooks, 1981, p. 75).
This depiction of scientific inquiry further supports the effect of the White masculinist’s normative thought-model in social science. The research reveals attempts at objective inquiry that are infected with sexist ideations. This passage reflects the lack of understanding and/or acceptance of the ways Black women’s lives have been effected by a history of oppression and how this subjugation influences their unique experience of reality. Moreover, racism is implied. Wright (1997) notes that social scientists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continued this legacy of racism in their endeavors to study Black women (p. 117). Wright calls it a subtle racism because White male scientists were perhaps not necessarily conscious of their racism. This idea of subtle can be argued, as there was and still is a propensity for the social sciences to remain highly exclusionary in acknowledging other philosophies of knowledge.