User:Makyahdix

Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female is a pamphlet written by Frances M. Beal in 1969. This highly influential pamphlet explores the intersections of oppression.It is a key statement of principles outlined by The Third World Women’s Alliance. Beal's essay talks about the misconceptions and troubles which come about when one tries to analyze the role of a Black female in society. It critiqued capitalism, reproductive rights, as well as social politicalization. Beal discusses how capitalism has destroyed humanity, and has had the most oppressive effects on the Black community. The creation of capitalism led to many things, including the destruction of relationships between Black men and women. The pamphlet was later revised and then published in The Black Woman, an anthology edited by Toni Cade Bambara in 1970. A revised version was included in the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women's Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan. Beal's essay talks about the misconceptions and troubles which come about when one tries to analyze the role of a black female in society. The pamphlet covers many different aspects of life and the levels of oppression placed upon Black women in the areas of capitalism, race, and gender.

Frances M. Beal

Frances M. Beal is a Black Feminist and political activist. Her work focused on civil rights, racial justice, peace and women’s rights. In 1958, she joined the NAACP, which began her journey in political activism. She then studied at the Sorbonne in France as a young woman. She was heavily influenced by the opposition students faced based on the colonial status of Algeria. She worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the early 1960s. In 1968, she founded the Black Women’s Liberation Committee for the SNCC, which became the Third World Women’s Alliance. Beal is a lifelong peace activist, and has provided foundational writing to Black Feminist Thought.

Economic Exploitation of Black Women[edit]

The first section of the pamphlet talks about the economics of black women and how on average in 1969, a non-white woman made approximately three times less than a white man. At the time, the wage scale for white men is $6,704, compared to the $2,861 Black women made. The capitalist system reduces Black women to level of enslavement. Men are exploited by capitalism as well, as they are given a level of superiority based on patriarchal beliefs. This superiority allows women to be exploited by the system. For example, Black women are given specific jobs as domestic and hospital workers, where employers can pay them less amounts of money than others in the same field. Beal thus exposes the concrete economic raison d'être of both racism and sexism. In other words, it pays, for some, to uphold such reactionary and divisive ideologies since the more a group of people is marginalized and discriminated against, the easier it is to exploit their labor (to have a pool of low-waged workers). Beal draws several conclusions from this: 1) that the divisions created between workers because of the different pay rates are hindering the advancement of the workers' struggle as a whole because white workers do not readily question their privileges; 2) that, in the end, one has to see different forms of exploitation as related to one another if we want to get rid of them all; 3) and that an awareness of, and an end to the super-exploitation of Black workers, and women in particular, should be a priority in the fight against capitalism. Division in the workforce creates a labor hierarchy. The labor hierarchy can influence work environments and overall treatment of employees. Since the formation of slavery, Black women have been viewed solely on a level servitude. Black women have always been viewed as workers. The collection of these ideas has had a negative impact on the way they are treated in the years following, even in modern times. When describing the labor market as a whole, Nina Banks states the Black women have always had the highest level participation, regardless of age, marital status, or number of children. The essay discusses economic oppression of black women from the perspective of racism. However, Beal did not analyze class oppression as an independent form of oppression. Although the economic oppression of black women was rooted in racism and sexism that historically constrained them to low wage jobs, black women face multiple oppressions that impede their liberation. The essay discusses how capitalist system within the American society defined manhood. An individual is considered a real "man" if he has a good job, makes a lot of money and drives a fancy car. For more context on this concept of manhood, see The Negro Family: The Case For National Action. The essay argues that many black women accepted this capitalist evaluation of manhood. This contributed in the strained relationship between the black man and woman as black women viewed black men as lazy, hence their lack of employment.

Bedroom Politics[edit]

In this section, Beal discusses the promotion of sterilization of non-white women in order to maintain population levels. Beal claims that the recent cry for birth control in both black and non white neighborhoods was more of a surgical genocide trying to prevent those of the non-white background from reproducing and increasing in numbers. She outlines the difference between sterilization tactics for men and women. A vasectomy for men is simple procedure that only takes a couple minutes to complete. On the opposite end, women have to go through a surgical procedure, a salpingectomy, which involves anesthetics. It is classified as a major surgery because it requires the removal of a fallopian tube, as well as an overnight hospital stay. Beal explains how non-white women were used as scapegoats when the birth control pill was created in. Puerto Rican and Black women were used to evaluate how efficient the pill was. The creation of the birth control pill also led to "Maternity Clinics" to be placed in Black and Puerto Rican communities. Sterilization done in unethical ways during the 1970s was based on Eugenics. Eugenics is a set of beliefs that aim at population control. Populations considered less desirable, specially people of color and poor people, have been vastly effected by the oppressive actions of birth control. The forced sterilization of black women and women of color violated their reproductive rights and this influence Beal's formation of Third World Women's Alliance and struggle for black women's liberation. Beal discusses the lack of access to legal abortion for black women and other women of color, thus threatening their health. However, black men were opposed to abortion for black women because they considered abortion as genocide for black people.

Relation to the White Movement[edit]

Another section of the essay focuses on the troubled relationship between black women and white women's movement. The difference is due to the white women's movement being too middle class and not speaking up against racism. Moreover, white women's movement was insensitive to black women's issues such as abortion rights, forced sterilization and welfare rights. The troubled relationship between black women and white women's movement was also seen in feminist organizations such as Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee as around 1965, white women were moving from SNCC to a more upper-middle-class Students for Democratic Society.

The New World[edit]

The final part of the essay focuses on the new world in which Beal discusses male supremacy within the Black Liberation movement. The pamphlet discusses the need for the Black Liberation movement to address the issues Black women face. Beal claims that since the beginning of the Black Power movement, Black men have been strong leaders. They recognize errors within the framework of government. However, issues faced by Black women are often ignored and viewed as invaluable. During this time, Black men believed that they were oppressed by Black women. Many leaders believed that they were put down by society, and Black women further contributed to their emasculation. Beal debunks these claims, explaining that while Black men been brutalized by society, it is unfair to disregard the oppression placed upon Black women, even from Black men themselves. The essay discusses the need to eliminate all forms of oppressions within society and the importance of Black women to be at the forefront of the Black liberation movement. This pamphlet played an important role in the black rights movement for women and black feminist scholarship. Beal's essay also influenced black feminist organizations such as the SNCC and TWWA. Beal influenced TWWA naming its newspaper Triple Jeopardy, and adopted an analysis of black women's oppression through lenses of race, class and gender.

Intersectionality and Feminism

Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how aspects of a person's social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Examples of these aspects are gender, caste, sex, race, class, sexuality, religion, disability, physical appearance, and height. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage. These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing. For example, a Black woman might face discrimination from a business that is not distinctly due to her race (because the business does not discriminate against Black men) nor distinctly due to her gender (because the business does not discriminate against white women), but due to a combination of the two factors.

Intersectionality broadens the lens of the first and second waves of feminism, which largely focused on the experiences of women who were both whiteand middle-class, to include the different experiences of women of color, women who are poor, immigrant women, and other groups. Intersectional feminism aims to separate itself from white feminism by acknowledging women's different experiences and identities.

The word intersectionality itself was first used by scholar and civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. While still a student studying to be a lawyer, she saw that gender and race were looked at as completely separate issues. To Crenshaw, studying them in isolation to each other made no sense. She saw that women of colour, for example, are doubly discriminated against, particularly in law.

The 1976 case of Degraffenreid vs General Motors is used by Kimberlé Crenshaw to this day to illustrate intersectionality. Five African American women sues car manufacturer General Motors for racial and gender discrimination. But the courts found that women in general weren’t discriminated against when it came to jobs as secretaries, and the fact that GM employed African American factory workers disproved racial discrimination.

It ignored the fact the sheer majority of secretaries were white women, and factory workers were all men. So the women lost.

References[edit]

This user is a student editor in University_of_Alabama/Black_Feminism_(Spring_2021).

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