Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 9:6885, 2008 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1524-0657 print/1940-9206

6 online DOI: 10.1080/15240650701759292

Reply to Commentaries: Black Sexual Politics Revisited

In this reply, I comment on one theme raised by each symposium author, expand on explicit ideas in Black Sexual Politics (2005) itself, and/or raise additional questions that broaden those of the symposium participants. First, I examine Ange-Marie Hancocks claim that my seeming privileging of race in Black Sexual Politics contradicts my prior work on intersectionality. Next, I respond to Shanette Harriss analysis of the power of the gaze. Finally, I examine Jean Wyatts focus on the interior space of black humanity to speculate about the ways in which healing constitutes a site of politics.

o one article, talk, book, or film can say all things to all people. Black Sexual Politics (2005) is no exception. This book, like my scholarship overall, provides an opportunity for readers to engage selected dimensions of one core question that frames the corpus of my work: What is the relationship between oppression and resistance? I approach this task of studying social inequalities and peoples responses to them through a strategy of dynamic centering, a stance of foregrounding selected themes and ideas while moving others to the background. In some studies, I focus more on oppression, whereas in other work I stress resistance. Sometimes I explore the signifi-

Patricia Hill Collins is a Distinguished University Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland, and the author of Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990).

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cance that the interior space of consciousness might play in shaping capitulation and/or resistance to varying forms of oppression. In other scholarship, I emphasize external social structures and social practices of both oppression and resistance, for example, social policies and social movement politics. This process of dynamic centering also allows me to examine more closely particular types of oppressionrace, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, and ethnicity as intersecting systems of powerwhile giving each varying theoretical weight from one work to the next. Because I work in the terrain of knowledgemy space of intellectual activismI remain intimately focused on questions of audience. Sometimes Im more concerned with theory and other times with praxis, keeping in mind that academics and general audiences read my work quite differently. I typically ask myself these questions: Who has the skills and ability to read what I write and who does not? Even though they possess the basic literacy to decode my work, who will encounter it with ease and who will be denied access to it? What can I say that will both speak to the concerns of different audiences and then engage specific aspects of my core concern of oppression and resistance? I open with these general comments to provide some guiding principles for the corpus of my intellectual production. Overall, I suggest that readers of Black Sexual Politics situate this book not solely within pre-established theoretical and/or ideological frameworks but also within my goal of addressing the larger question of oppression and resistance, my basic methodology of dynamic centering, and my need to remain cognizant of the political hierarchies that frame possible readerships. I am honored to have Black Sexual Politics included in this special symposium. Rather than responding to the articles themselves, I have identified one core theme from each essay that seems especially important to each author and that also resonates with a larger concern within the corpus of my scholarship as well as within this particular work. Ange-Marie Hancock enters the argument from the vantage point of academic social theory and suggests that my seeming privileging of race in Black Sexual Politics contradicts my prior work on intersectionality. She wonders why I focus on race and racism and further contests the version of racism that I do present. Shanette Harris stresses the significance of preserving Black hu-

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manity by taking on the issue of the power of the gaze to destroy it and the necessity to defend it. This raises questions about the shifting social organization of the gaze, in particular, the manifestations of racial power across varying social class segments, as well as how the interior space of Black lived experience can be marshaled to counter it. Jean Wyatt focuses on the interior space of Black humanity to speculate about the ways in which healing constitutes a site of politics. Wyatt tackles the clinical implications of one idea, namely, that of the Strong Black Woman (SBW), asking how the argument might be extended in useful directions for a new politics of Black feminism. In what follows, Ill address each of these three issues by commenting on specific aspects of the theme raised by a particular author, expanding on explicit ideas in Black Sexual Politics itself, and/ or raising additional questions that broaden those of the symposium participants. DYNAMIC CENTERING AND INTERSECTIONALITY In her essay, Ange-Marie Hancock asks, How does the explicit and unapologetic privileging of race in Black Sexual Politics challenge Collinss earlier both/and constructions in Black Feminist Thought and Fighting Words? Via this question, Hancock assumes that I have privileged race in this volume, posits that intersectional scholarship should look a certain way, namely, how I approached it in earlier work, and wonders why I have strayed from my own path. Quite simply, I havent. Instead, the approach that I take in Black Sexual Politics illustrates how I use dynamic centering as part of an ongoing project, which goes beyond this specific book, to conceptualize intersectionality. In this section of the essay, I want to sketch out in broad brush strokes how I negotiate a fundamental question that I recognize in my own work, namely, What does one do when faced with the task of theorizing social phenomena through the lens of intersectionality while recognizing that the lens itself is a continually shifting entity? I see at least three sites of intersectional scholarship, namely, (1) developing intersectional analyses of specific topics and/or social practices (the case of racism in the post-rights era), (2) conceptualizing sys-

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tems of power via intersectional frameworks (how race, class, and gender, for example, might mutually construct one another as systems of power), and (3) conceptualizing intersectionality itself (is it a theory, a paradigm, a methodology?). Ironically, it is difficult if not impossible to develop any of these three sites without knowing quite a bit about separate systems of power of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age, and ability, among others. Yet few of us can ever grasp the nuances of scholarship produced within these separate fields of study with sufficient depth and scope to produce a thoroughly intersectional analysis of our subject. By default, intersectional work is typically partial, for example, race and gender or race and class, and so forth. It is also initially inherently comparative, a dynamic chain of similarities and differences that enable us to see points of overlap, convergence, and divergence among what are conceptualized as separate entities but that collectively comprise one entity. Given these complexities, Ive become fascinated with mapping how thinkers actually cut into the magnitude of this task of completing an intersectional analysis of a chosen topic or expanding knowledge about how race, class, and gender among others intersect as systems of power and/or developing a meta-theoretical analysis of the construct of intersectionality. For many, the default position typically consists of working within the one system that one encountered first and/or knows best, whether it be gender, or sexuality, or class, and so on, as well as privileging theories and interpretive paradigms with which one seemingly has the most affinity (e.g., Hancocks approach of starting her analysis via a dialogue between psychoanalysis and a seemingly already defined intersectionality). The next step typically consists of extrapolating the theories, paradigms, and/or methodological approaches gained from a given thinkers point of origin (e.g., a sexuality-first stance bundled together with psychoanalytic theory, or a race-first position coupled with Marxist social theory, or a gender-first analysis wedded to Michel Foucaults power analysis to each of the three sites of intersectional scholarship) and applying it to the task at hand. One has to start somewhere, yet a problem occurs when thinkers reify their respective starting points and cease to examine the assumptions that frame them. These starting points can become the taken-for-granted frameworks upon which all subsequent work is constructed. When coupled with the exponential growth of systems

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of power that are now more visibleI look nostalgically at the good old days of race, class, and gender, which themselves have yet to be reconciled via an intersectional analysiswe search for shortcuts that will move us from the point of origin of recognizing the need for an intersectional analysis and proclaiming that we have accomplished it. There is a rush to tidy up the messiness of always having to say race and class and gender and sexuality and ethnicity and age and nationality and ability by searching for overarching terms that will capture this complexity. The term difference tries to do this kind of heavy lifting, typically unsuccessfully. If we are not careful, the term intersectionality runs the same risk of trying to explain everything yet ending up saying nothing. This combination of holding fast to ones point of origin and the rush to close intersectionality prematurely can foster a f lawed myth of equivalent oppressions, the notion that one system of power can be substituted for another. Within this logic, racial discrimination is the same as gender discrimination, and so forth, and what a thinker typically perceives both to be can ref lect his or her particular point of origin thinking. This approach to intersectionality simply assumes that all systems of power are both structured and operate in a similar fashion and that they can be added together as a megaoppression for which we should search for one term (e.g., difference) to replace the specificity of the multiple, more situated systems that catalyze analysis in the first place. Yet different systems of power not only may be organized quite differently (with corresponding bodies of literature that situate their scholarly practitioners in distinctive points of origin), they also may be structured quite differently within the same society and across diverse societies. For example, gender and sexuality operate as proximate systems of power, annexing the power of the erotic and the everyday, whereas race, class, and ethnicity tend to be organized in more macro-structural ways, through practices such as segregating social groups and the unequal treatment that can ensue. Thus, if one approached intersectionality from a gendered point of origin, one might stress interpersonal relations and the significance of interior space as the site of interest, whereas if one approached it from a race/class/ethnicity point of origin, one might stress social policies and social movement politics. These two points of origin do not preclude one anotherclearly gender and sexuality have social policy implications and race and

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class shape individual lives. Rather, the task lies in refusing to collapse one into the other by privileging one over the other. In negotiating this field of cognitive land mines, I have found the concept of relational thinking to be particularly helpful. Relational thinking moves from initial point-of-origin comparisons of asking how things are alike and different, for example, the question of the similarities and differences that characterize racism and heterosexism, to asking the ways in which racism and heterosexism mutually construct one another as systems of power (the question that I engaged in Black Sexual Politics). Questioning the ways in which these two entities are related is quite different from simply comparing them. Moreover, the process of dynamic centering proves to be a useful framing technique for such relational thinking. It enables me to focus on the relationships among two or three entities without trying to think about everything all of the time. These dual concepts of relational thinking and dynamic centering shape the choices that I made concerning the overarching theoretical framework of Black Sexual Politics. Let me say a bit more first about dynamic centering and next how it operates within this particular project. Dynamic centering constitutes a way of working that places two or more entities at the center of analysis to get a closer look at their mutual construction. One changes the entity at the center of analysis from one project to the next to assemble multiple analyses, angles of vision, and/or standpoints on the topic at hand. It is similar to taking a snapshot of a graduation ceremonyyou know that the event itself is far more comprehensive than what can be captured by the tool of one camera from one angle of vision at one point in time. Each individual snapshot provides a distinctive look at the relationships that are captured within its frame, yet each also provides but one piece of a much larger story. The goal here is not to freeze a slice of lived experience and reify it as truth but rather to examine one way of framing reality that can be combined with many photographs in the album (ideally taken by other people). Dynamic centering affects my work in specific ways. When it comes to theorizing intersectionality, I have to decide which systems of power to bracket as so-called background systems and which of two or three entities of the pantheon of systems of power to emphasize in the foreground. For example, in Black Feminist Thought: Knowl-

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edge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990), thinking relationally about race and gender occupies the front stage whereas sexuality and class are held more constant. I certainly discuss class, sexuality, and nation in that volume, but the focus remains on the relationships (or intersections) of race and gender. In contrast, in From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism and Feminism (2006), I focus on intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, and nation in state power as well as on group-based political responses to it. Age and sexuality constitute topics of discussion, but they are not the analytical focus. In Black Sexual Politics, dynamic centering shifts the focus to intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in the post-civil rights era of color-blind racism, not to privilege race but to get a more nuanced analysis of race in relationship to sexuality, gender, and class. For any given project, my choice of which intersecting systems of power will assume center stage and which I will bracket ref lects a careful look at actual social conditions and asking what I need to know to understand them. As I mention in Black Feminist Thought, all systems of power are always in every situation, but the salience of any given system of power will vary across time and space. I see race and racism as especially salient in the post-9/11 American climate, one where considerable pressure to move beyond race by erasing the legacy of racism exists. Racism may be especially salient because it is not seen as being so. Black Sexual Politics is crafted at the intersection of two of the three previously mentioned sites of intersectional scholarship, namely, (1) conceptualizing intersecting systems of power (I engage two sites to build upon my prior work on race and gender not simply to expand analyses of sexuality and to a lesser degree, social class), and (2) developing an intersectional analysis of the topic of racism in the post-civil rights era. Although Black Sexual Politics can be read as also developing a meta-analysis of the theory of intersectionality, this was not my explicit goal as it is in this section of this essay. Instead, I drew upon the dual concepts of relational thinking and dynamic centering to use intersectionality as a heuristic device, a framing mechanism that would allow me to develop a more robust intersectional analysis of the intersecting power systems that constitute contemporary racism. Race is not, to utilize Hancocks words, the primary optic used to analyze social phenomena. Rather, the

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primary optic is intersectionality (as described methodologically here) as applied to the important social topic of the contemporary situation of African Americans. PRESERVING BLACK HUMANITY: THE PERMEABLE VEIL By now, it is hard to get away from the concept of the gaze. Michel Foucaults social theory seems to be everywhere, and his detailed genealogies of the emergence of the gaze as part of technologies of control in Western societies serve contemporary social theory well. Yet over a century ago in Souls of Black Folk, William E. B. Du Bois (1903) also invoked the concept of a gaze as a technique of power. His discussion of double consciousness among African Americans identifies the veil as a distorting barrier of racial images, one that provides Whites with ideological justifications for their racial prejudice and that encourages those Blacks who see themselves through the veil to take on the oppressors point of view. Du Bois identified the core question that the power relations attached to the racial veil seemingly raised for Black humanity: How does it feel to be a problem? Despite my suspicions about why this particular dimension of Du Boiss writings remains the one that is so often retrieved from the vast corpus of his work, I very much like Shanette Harriss linking of the metaphors of the veil and the gaze as techniques of power. In essence, the veil can cut two ways. On the one hand, it can operate as a mechanism of power via its ideological justifications of Black subordination. On the other hand, when claimed by Blacks, the veil can also constitute a mechanism to protect the interior space of Black humanity from the external assaults of racism. The veil is not a simple fencerather, it constitutes a permeable border space where Black humanity must decide how much to reveal to non-Blacks, under what terms, and why. The gaze has a similar dual identity. On the one hand, the gaze constitutes a technique of control whereby an individual or group with more power can control the less powerful via technologies of surveillance. The gaze is not simply one person staring another downinstead it references the many strategies that keep Blacks feeling watched in situations that they do not control and where, ostensibly, they do not belong or else belonging is contin-

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gent on certain behaviors. On the other hand, people who are watched by the gaze of the more powerful find ways to gaze back, often developing quite sophisticated oppositional consciousness. To explore the question of preserving/protecting collective Black humanity within contemporary, intersecting power relations, Id like to share a few thoughts concerning the relationship between the gaze and the veil in the context of the new racism. One implication of the analysis of the veil and the gaze is that the gaze is not simply a relationship between equalswith the veil as a benign curtain separating two individuals who are joined by shared humanity yet separated by antiquated social customs (as race in brackets is popularly thought to be). Rather, the gaze references power relationships of unequal social groups as refracted through social institutions and practices. The veil distinguishes public from private space, with the public elevated over the private within this social binary. Another implication of the construct of the gaze is that, when applied to race, it becomes virtually impossible to live as a fully human Black person in a society structured by racism in the public space of social institutions. In the intense surveillance of public spaces organized via the racial gaze, one is either the owner of the power to gaze or the object that is gazed at. Previous generations of African Americans living under strict, Jim Crow segregation recognized that all Whites had the power to pinion all Blacks with the power of the White gaze. Despite White intentions that the veil should diminish Black humanity, the veil also brought respite from White racism. It marked the boundaries of the Black community, an interior space of collective Blackness where Black individuals could find affirming Black identities. Yet another implication concerns gender. Not only do the gaze and the veil reference racially marked groupsthese core ideas are also implicitly gendered. Within a gendered framework, men possess the gaze and women undergo surveillance. Public space, the place where the gaze is organized via social institutions, is gendered as male, whereas private space, by default, the space that escapes public scrutiny, becomes marked as female space. In this context, the veil becomes a gendered spatial border, one distinguishing male from female, public from private, and in the context of U.S. race relations, White from Black. Through the lens of race and gender, the permeable boundary of the veil ironically marks the private space of Blackness by gendering it as female.

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The popular solution offered to veiled women, namely, that taking off the veil (which often symbolizes backwardness of ethnicity and/or religion) to become thoroughly Western will empower individual women, bears striking resemblance to the advice offered to African Americans under the new racism. Westerners who see the veil as a symbol of womens oppression in non-Western and/or Muslim societies offer facile advice such as take off your veil and you will be free as a quick fix to perceived gender inequalities. In a similar fashion, African Americans are encouraged to throw off the veil of race-holding and become less Black. Yet this strategy of unquestioned assimilation only makes sense in the context of a new racism that argues that racial problems are pass. Many White Americans whose conceptions of freedom remain tied to assumptions of individualism and shopping in an unfettered marketplace find it hard to imagine why anyone would choose metaphorically to veil himself or herself with non-Western identities of race, gender, religion, and/or ethnicity. Yet for women, Blacks, and minority religious and/or ethnic groups living within Western societies, public space is not yet safe space. Throwing off the veil does not mean that one automatically acquires the power of the gaze. Holding onto the veil too tightly is no solution either. It is completely plausible to hide behind the veil as a retreat from the politics of engaging these same inequalities of public space. This type of social withdrawal redefines the veil as a fixed border, an impenetrable shell that can cut off those inside from the full spectrum of fully human relationships. In Black Sexual Politics, my focus on the new racism emphasized selected complexities of the post-civil rights era, namely, the multiple social locations where oppression and resistance operate, the places where gazing and gazing back occur across the now more permeable border of the post-civil rights veil. My presentation of a structural argument of the heterogeneity of lived Black experience, femininity and masculinity, straight and gay, across different social classes, constitutes a template for thinking through how the gaze as a technique of power operates differently with different Black sub-populations as well as what types of veiling might occur in response. In this regard, I think that social class differences matter greatly in determining how Blacks might respond to class-specific manifestations of the gaze, in particular, which sub-populations will encounter pressures to assimilate and any use of veiling that might ensue. It is critical to

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remember that social class is not simply an apolitical identity category that is equivalent to being a cheerleader, an opera singer, or a soccer Mom. Individuals playing these social roles can summon power and money, but the system of social class is the group-based arrangement of power and money that is invoked. Unequal social structures lie at the heart of social class analysissocial class as a structure of power assigns class identities to individuals and shapes the social roles that are available to them. Unlike becoming a cheerleader, an opera singer, or a soccer Mom, acquiring a social class identity requires no agency, no construction on the part of the individual. One is born poor, rich, or in-between, and, despite the myth of the meritocracy, the fact of birth shapes life experiences thereafter, including access to the gaze as a technique of power, any social mobility up or down that may occur in ones lifetime, as well as the need for the concept of the veil, let alone differential patterns in deploying it. Harriss work has pushed me to think a bit more about the utility of the metaphors of the veil and the gaze in examining the strategies used by different class segments of African Americans in negotiating complex contemporary social realities. Before the 1960s, African Americans as a group simultaneously occupied a more homogeneous social class position and also routinely expressed concern about Whites perceptions of them. This attentiveness to the power of a White gaze, buttressed by de jure and de facto discrimination, permeated the politics of the civil rights era. Not being attentive to the White gaze could get any Black person in trouble at any time, sometimes with tragic results. In this climate, concern with the presentation of the Black self in public meant that manipulating public images of Blackness became increasingly important to politics. The veil operated like mirrored sunglasses, ref lecting back to the White world their own image of what they wanted to see. That was then. Social class differences in the post-civil rights era have generated for African Americans, especially Black youth, entirely new challenges concerning the connections between the gaze and the veil as a strategy of response. To overgeneralize for purposes of this brief argument, the greatly changed circumstances of social organization of the post-civil rights era mean that large numbers of poor and working-class Black kids in urban areas encounter a disproportionately small number of Whites, other than the police, with

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sufficient power to cause them to worry much about being careful of what they say and/or do around Whites. Racial segregation has removed Whites from their daily social settings. At the same time, Black middle-class kids in racially integrated settings encounter a disproportionately large number of Whites who scrutinize their daily activities. Ever under surveillance, they must be more careful of what they say and/or do because the repercussions seem high. Both groups encounter different techniques of surveillance and just as each group occupies a distinctive social location, each group might express a distinctive relationship between the gaze and the veil. I suggest that the lived experiences of poor and working-class Black urban youth have profoundly shifted the meaning and potential utility of the very concepts of the gaze and the veil. Trends within hip-hop, a cultural movement begun by Black youth in New York City, provide one clue. In the 1980s, hip-hop was primarily an art form for Black urban kids by Black urban kids, expressing the realities of their lives honed within social institutions that increasingly treated young Black men as fodder for the criminal justice system and young Black women as deadbeat welfare mothers. As a cultural product of distressed Black neighborhoods, hip-hop initially expressed little interest in molding itself in response to the pressures of the White gaze. Kids in hip-hop did not see themselves as being a problem and most certainly did not want to share their feelings about how they felt about Whites seeing them as a problem. Rather, despite the unevenness of various artists ability to present compelling analyses of racism and capitalism, rap artists were quite clear that they saw the circumstances of their lives as being a greater problem. By the 1990s, as hip-hop became more mainstream, some versions (Im thinking of conscious rap) continued the relative lack of concern with the White gaze by raising critical social issues that affected Blacks. In contrast, the explosive success of commercial hip-hop, in particular, gangsta rap and its progeny, seemingly confronted the power of the gaze. Commercial hip-hop takes the gaze and turns it back upon itself in fascinating and troubling ways. Commercial hip-hop can be seen as a masculine, and as some would say, sexist reverse gaze, a posture of cursing, crotch grabbing, in your face spectacle that rejects middle-class discourses of Black respectability and their connections with the feminized space of Blackness behind the veil. Commercial hip-hop can also be seen as an example

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of the successful assimilation of those Blacks who have carefully gazed back at White power and embrace one set of core values of American society, namely, getting rich. The dress and demeanor of young Blacks who sell Black culture may invoke thug life, but their behavior places them squarely within American entrepreneurial traditions. Collectively, poor and working-class Black youth express much less interest in engaging in self-reflexive dialogue about White peoples perceptions of them as problems than expressing anger about the realities of their lives. In contrast, middle-class African American youth seemingly face a qualitatively different set of issues concerning processes of gazing back and the utility of the veil as a gendered strategy for protecting the space of Black humanity. I would expect to see the greatest concern expressed about the gaze and the veils related question of how does it feel to be a problem among middle-class African American youth who, as individuals, either integrate all-White settings and/or function primarily in social settings where they constitute a small racial minority. Here the price of acceptance may be the ability to act White while remaining physically marked as Black, in other words, rejecting any politics thought to be associated with race. How does one do this? How does one appropriate the power of the White gaze against oneself? This demand was virtually unheard of for the youth of Du Boiss day, most of who lived in neighborhoods and attended schools that shielded them from the power of the White gaze. Yet the children of the one third of African Americans who are classified as being middle class negotiate these relations of surveillance and veiling on a daily basis. Moreover, I would anticipate that differential strategies of veiling frame the responses of young African American men and women faced with the pressures of assimilation. Overall, the veil constitutes a shifting line in the sand of Black social class relations in f lux, one that signifies the contradictions that accompany the White gaze as a technique of power. Black humanity may gain a modicum of protection behind the veil, whether the uncompromising claiming of the hood expressed in rap videos or the continuation of all-Black tables in college dining halls. Yet Black humanity becomes simultaneously vulnerable behind that veil because new relations must be worked out behind it. Thats the impetus of much of Black Sexual Politicsto respect the power of gazing back but also to

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challenge unquestioned assumptions such as the utility of sexist postures of gazing back or the assumption that community crafted behind the veil is a comfortable space of retreat for everyone. Relations of inequality that structure wider society and that also have long existed within Black communities (in Black Sexual Politics, those of gender and sexuality) can continue uninterrupted, all the while masquerading as an anti-racist politics. Stated differently, the interior space of Blackness, protected by the veil yet also locked in by it, may offer some protection via strategies of reverse gazing, but such gazing done without an intersectional analysis of gender, sexuality, and class remains limited. What kind of politics can occur in this space, one that is complexly defined, always dynamic, and tightly bundled in with the changing social relations of the new racism? HEALING AS A SITE OF POLITICS Through her analysis of the Strong Black Woman (SBW) image, Jean Wyatt moves us closer to answering the question of what kinds of politics might be needed within the space of Black humanity behind the veil. By encouraging us seriously to consider healing as a site of politics, Wyatt identifies the significance of a therapeutic praxis that might incorporate an understanding of the complexities of Black sexual politics. Identifying the profession of pain as a political statement, Wyatt suggests, Liberation would come from a redefinition of what it means to be strong and black and a woman. What will it take, however, for African American women as a collectivity as well as Black feminism as a discourse devoted to Black womens well being to get there? Let me discuss three issues that come to mind in addressing Wyatts question. First, I think that it is critical to consider whose interests are served by the perpetuation of the SBW image and how this might affect Black womens willingness to perform it, regardless of social class. Created neither solely by Whites (although Whites certainly benefit from being able to exploit Black womens seeming strength), nor by African American men who were searching for better ways to exploit the women in their lives, this image also ref lects Black womens agency in striving for self-definitions unencumbered by the negatives associated with other controlling images. This image also has a long history within African American communities, one

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where Black women have been praised for their contributions to Black communities and Black politics. Rejecting images such as the mule or the whore are easier because these images are clearly designed to be controlling images that serve the interests of others. In contrast, deconstructing the putatively positive SBW image becomes more complicated, primarily due to the need to redefine control in the context of Black community politics. putatively: reputed to be has a tone of "but it's not Second, and relatedly, I think that it is important to recognize that, as a both/and construct, the SBW image has both positive and negative meanings for African American women. On the one hand, The SBW image it falls squarely within the category of protecting oneself from the the SBW is viewe power of the White gaze via a gender-specific expression of armorhaving the ability ing oneself to do battle with the world. Putting on armor invokes the the power of the W tradition of veiling, where one protects the private space that is p.82). Conversely Black and female from the external gaze. On the other hand, this suggests that bla very same strength, this very same armoring, creates vulnerabilities. They can internal Not only can the SBW image foster the impression that Black women that by asking for need no help, those women who do can be seen as race traitors or and violence com as inauthentic Black women. In the pantheon of images available to "inauthentic black Black women from which to craft individual and collective identities, the SBW remains one of the most positive and potentially liberating, yet it is also one that often comes with heavy costs. Third, modern Black feminism plays a special role in efforts to develop a more robust analysis of the SBW image. Often lacking the ability to see beyond the binary (and I would include some of my earlier work here), it causes us to be either for or against all controlling images, including this one. Because Black feminism has devoted itself to analyzing how taken-for-granted ideas that create controlling images affect Black womens lives, this discourse has emphasized the penalties that Black women pay for being Black women. By rejecting the SBW image altogether, versions of hip-hop feminism follow this same Black feminist logic. We have yet another version of unveiling, only this time the veil to be shed consists of the strictures of living the SBW image. Black feminism has striven to remove the SBW image from the space of privilege it enjoys within Black civil society and squeeze it into its own framework of penalty. Redefining the SBW controlling image requires a more precise vocabulary that will enable us to dig ourselves (and Black feminism) out of the hole of not seeing the connections between the SBW

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image and Black womens agency and either/or thinking that encourages people to be either for or against the image. To develop a new meaning of Black and woman and strong, I see a distinction between using the term damage, with its focus on the state of the victim, and harm, which, because it places greater emphasis on the relationship between abuser and victim, identifies the culpability of abusers and potential responsibility for restitution. These two terms certainly draw meaning from one another, yet they also suggest very different outcomes for the SBW image as well as any politics that might accompany it. Discourses of damage produce descriptive inventories of suffering that encourage victims to identify and share their pain. If one is damaged by the SBW role, the solution is simplestop doing it and let the chips fall where they may. Individual strength emerges from rejecting the putative strength of the SBW role. Healing occurs when individual Black women shed the veil of the SBW image. The focus is on the individual victim, of trying to make her whole. This is a worthy goal. For the individual, claiming damage done by expressing ones feelings about being a problem can produce the benefits of healing. Yet at the same time, in the absence of alternatives for Black women as a collectivity, I remain cautious about claiming damage and prematurely relinquishing the SBW role. Quite frankly, what do Black women gain by relinquishing the SBW image via admitting that they are damaged? The battle that catalyzed the need for armor will not cease by simply taking off ones armor. Prematurely relinquishing this piece of battle armor can garner worse treatment than The importance before. Black women who take the risk of sharing vulnerabilities in place before must have support systems and networks in place. None of the Black shed the SBW feminists who counsel Black women to expose the damage done to them by the SBW image can guarantee that the vast majority of African American women who take this risk in everyday life will be healed or even supported. I suspect that the SBW construct remains so widely embraced by many Black women because it offers the familiar yet uneven protection of armoring in response to new forms of verbal and physical violence that characterize the new racism. Sadly, many poor and working-class African American communities remain dangerous places where any sign of weakness can get you killed. Abusive boyfriends, fathers, neighbors, and husbands are one starting place, yet without indicting the harm done by a culture of

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violence that so denigrates Black women that White men comfortably call us nappy-headed hos, fussing about the inner workings of the SBW image can be seen as splitting hairs. What sister in her right mind is going to share her pain in this context? Theres no guarantee that anyone will care, including her overworked counselor at her urban public high school or mental health worker at her neighborhood clinic. In contrast to this focus on the decontextualized, damaged individual, because discourses of harm focus on the relationship between those engaging in harmful acts and those who experience them, they suggest different analyses and courses of action. Harm potentially is a more robust construct that does not stop analysis at simply fixing the damaged victim and then sending her back out into an unchanged world. Instead, harm implies an analysis of how Black womens relationships with all sorts of individuals as well as with social institutions foster growth or damage. Assessing harm requires investigating the question of individual and collective responsibility for all social outcomes, including harm done to Black women. In essence, damage will continue to occur to individual Black women until the sources of harm to Black women as a collectivity are identified. A politics of healing that focuses on individual and collective harm, yet that also recognizes that many Black women have in fact been damaged by oppression, suggests a different kind of politics. A robust, intersectional analysis of harm might rejoin damage, harm, and social context, for example, the earlier discussion of social class and gendered responses to the gaze, thus creating space for new agency around the concept of strength. The focus on harm places constructs such as the SBW in a network of relationships: how racism and sexism harm African American women differently across different social classes, sexualities, ages, and citizenship categories and how social actors who are differentially embedded in these same relations and who engage in such harm are culpable. Rather than assuming the battle armor of the SBW image and f lailing away in the darkness at unseen enemies, strength comes from recognizing the nature of the battle itself. Knowing that deciding to armor (claiming the SBW persona) is a strategic decision and is not hardwired into Black womens nature is essential. One continually chooses and re-chooses how to play the game of being an SBW

However, it is im like the SBW af depending on th in life (age, SES

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rather than assuming that it is a fixed identity or script where the outcome is known at the beginning. Black Sexual Politics is not designed primarily to be a theory of intersectionality or an analysis of the gaze or even a discussion of healing as a site of politics. Rather, Black Sexual Politics is a theoretical and political book that aims to equip individuals with the tools to craft individual and collective political solutions to contemporary expressions of oppression. Black Sexual Politics is not as a finished recipe that can be followed to achieve freedom. For that, we each must make our own way. REFERENCES
Collins, P. H. (1990), Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman. _____ (2005), Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge. _____ (2005), From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903), The Souls of Black Folk. New York: The Modern Library, 1993. Department of Sociology University of Maryland 2112 Art-Sociology Building College Park, MD 20742-1315 [email protected]