Rose M. Brewer

Theorizing Race, Class, and Gender: The New Scholarship of Black Feminist Intellectuals and Black Women’s Labor

The purpose in this article is to explicate some of the recent theorizing on race, class and gender by Black feminist thinkers in the academy. This theorizing is further explored in an analysis of Black womens labor and African-American class formation. The labor transformation of Black women is explicated in terms of economic restructuring and capital mobility, racial formation and gender inequality. It is a process linking Black women in the Northeast and Midwest to the South and Southwest, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. It is not the tie of poverty to prosperity, but the tie of subordinate status to subordinate status crosscut by internal class differences in all these regions. Most important, only in theorizing the complexity of the intersections of race, class and gender can we adequately prepare to struggle for social change in the African-American community.

Black women's studies: From theory to transformative practice

The current period of global capitalist crisis presents daunting challenges for struggles against transnational capital, white supremacy, and global heteropatriarchy. A complex theoretical and practice-oriented understanding of Black Women’s Studies is needed. The call for Black Women’s Studies was first articulated by Anna Julia Cooper in the early twentieth century. The “Combahee River Collective Statement” of 1977 was a major landmark, and For Some of Us Are Brave (Hull, Bell Scott, and Smith 1982) became the leading conceptual volume in the field. But too little has been added to this in the new century. A recent volume, Still Brave (James, Smith Foster, and Guy-Sheftall 2009), makes an initial attempt, but leaves unanswered a number of questions around social transformation. The current crisis has produced some of the most vicious attacks on black women – our lives, our children. The Katrina travesty publicly exposed the disposability of poor African Americans. The move to the right in the US and the public attack on all working people has been especially hard. The dismantling of a social wage not only forces exploitative labor and poverty onto millions of women in the US, but takes away basic rights – to food, shelter, housing and

Black Women and Feminist Sociology: The Emerging Perspective

Since the 1960s, leftists, interpretive sociologists, black nationalists and feminists have challenged the subject matter, methods, and social control functions of sociology. The feminist critique continues today, but it is arguable that a “fourth critique” of the field is in the making. This fourth critique emanates from the writings of a black feminist intelligentsia. Its theoretical anchor is a developing perspective on the intersection of race, class, and gender. This intersection is an important revision of feminist sociology and feminist theory, which tend to emphasize gender. The perspective is also corrective of race relations perspectives, which are often omissive of gender. The perspective, therefore, is recreative and may be transformatory of all prior critiques of the field.

Black radical theory and practice: Gender, race, and class

(2003). Black radical theory and practice: Gender, race, and class. Socialism and Democracy: Vol. 17, Radical Perspectives on Race and Racism, pp. 109-122.

21st-Century Capitalism, Austerity, and Black Economic Dispossession

The article is an analysis of late capitalism and the nature of Black inequality today given the political economy of late capitalism. As always, the fundamental fact of 21st-century capitalism is profit. Yet the system is in crisis, centered in a crisis of accumulation. Given this, what are the consequences for the Black population in the United States and globally? A number of key questions inform the discussion, centered on the nature of capitalism today. Issues of austerity, neoliberalism, race, gender, and class are interrogated. Then there is the issue of how might the situation be changed. Using the September 2012 Chicago Teachers Union strike as an entry point, an initial set of reflections on how might we resist and struggle are articulated, centering some key lessons from the fight for educational justice in Chicago.

Diaspora, identities, gender, race, and class: Ruminations on black studies for a new century

I have been thinking about two ways of framing my remarks for this essay. I think of these two issues because recently I had the pleasure of hearing Hortense Spillers at a conference on African American studies held at Macalester College. Her opening observations on the field of black studies involved a threefold conceptual delineation. The two most prominent of these frameworks are black studies scholarship ensconced in Eurocentric disciplinary traditions and black studies scholarship centered in Afrocentrism. Writings in the Eurocentric tradition are infused with the humanities, social sciences, education, and so forth. Although evoking the study of black people, scholars in this genre are shaped by disciplinary norms. Indeed, sometimes the Eurocentric assumptions are nearly invisible to the analyst but are shaping nonetheless. The second dominant frame renders visible an Afrocentric frame. Writers in this tradition have been prominent in the public representation of the field. A third emerging framework is black feminism. Black feminist writers are crafting a paradigm in which gender is rendered visible and is deeply intersectional with race and class. As noted by Spillers, this perspective, unfortunately, is still too often marginal to the field. It is, however, the perspective I would like to imagine at the center of black studies for a new century and something I will say more about later in this essay. Spillerss observations seem accurate to me, but it also strikes me that these perspectives should be thought about in the context of a political, economic, and social set of realities undergirding black studies. This is contested terrain, but essentially theories are rooted in the politics of black studies. On this

Capitalism, Racism, and the Neoliberal University: The Case of the University of Missouri (Mizzou)

One of the most dramatic moments in higher education in 2015 occurred when Black students brought down a University of Missouri system’s president and, shortly after, the chancellor of the flagship campus at Columbia resigned. In the wake of the police murder of Michael Brown and subsequent Ferguson protests, University of Missouri Black students stood up to power. This is the story of Black student protest catalyzed by campus racism, classism and neoliberalism at a major university in the United States. It captures the broader story of neoliberal capitalism and the corporatized university in higher education. What are the implications of this story for teaching race and political economy? The students’ search for racial justice demands instructors to step-up our teaching to enter the critical sociological classroom these students have created. Instructors of capitalism and economic inequality must draw upon Black student struggles and develop an understanding of the radical Black Studies tradition.

Transformatory, community based teaching about race

Teaching about race is not just a theoretical exercise. It has much to do with connecting theory with practice. A robust approach to teaching race is embedded in moving theory into the world. In this essay the case is made for a transformatory approach to teaching about race through connecting students to communities in struggle for racial justice. Situating race thinking in action-centered social contexts is key to this approach. Students begin to learn directly how racism is located socially and constructed politically. Thus classrooms and communities become spaces where activists, scholars, and students co-create change in theory and practice. This demands working together toward the social transformation of a highly unequal society. Teaching race through community engagement is also a practice where we draw upon the knowledge and histories of communities in struggle. The signature lesson of this approach is that racial change comes from activated communities committed to moving in the world for social transformation.

On twenty-first century social transformation: Class, nation, gender and race in a period of revolution and capitalist crisis

AbstractThis article is an analysis of the Black liberation struggle in the context of current capitalist crisis. The past forty-plus years since 1968 is the periodization embodied in this framework. The analysis is partially a rumination on the current state of Black America and the Black liberation struggle. Some discussion of an emergent black left and the United States Social Forum as a process for social transformation is considered. It is, as well, a look into Black feminist interventions in the Black freedom struggle. Core here is the feminist demand to center race, class, gender in intersectionality. Finally, some thought is given to the interplay and complexities surrounding class and the Black right in the US with implications for the current period.