What I Learned from Black Feminist Thought...

 

Being a student in Black Feminist Thought has been very challenging. It was a class where identifying my own oppression and victimization was inevitable. I was presented with many ideologies that have never been discussed in my community, yet I was intuitively experiencing them every day. My experience in this course can be summed up best by James Baldwin who said, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” However, in my case, it was often being in a rage and stuck between “a rock and a hard place.” Being the child of Christian parents who wholeheartedly believe that I should cautiously live my life to avoid confrontation with white supremacy, and being colleagues with scholar activists ready to transform society at any means necessary, forced me to self-introspect and question the position and type of impact I would like to have on my society. How can I actively participate in the radical transformation taking place in front of me, yet take heed to the instructions given to me to live a cautionary life? I look forward to continuing to evaluate my own black experience, strategizing ways to counteract the perception of blacks and black women, while obtaining knowledge through many scholars and my experience.