The womanist theory

I’m always amazed at how quickly Black women embrace the term womanist and reject the term feminist. You hear the same argument all the time, “White women have commandeered the feminist movement for their own agenda so I consider myself a womanist because of what Alice Walker wrote about in her book, “In Search of our Mother’s Gardens.” Here’s the news flash. White people commandeer everything to fit their agenda, there’s nothing new there, and Alice walker didn’t come up with a womanist theory, she wrote “womanist prose” a term to describe the soulfulness and struggle of Black women. Black women are so terrified of being called lesbian and so afraid of offending patriarchal Black men with the term feminist, that they’ve embraced the term womanist and it’s gone unchecked.

What’s the difference between a feminist and a womanist? Well, a womanist is more concerned with Black issues. Does that mean that we need to come up with a different name for Democrat since I’m more concerned with Black issues than white Democrats? Well, a womanist is more concerned with the family. Well, white women get married more than Black women so the womanist movement isn’t being particularly effective, are they? Entire bodies of study have been created at universities all over the nation in order to appease the insecurities of Black women who are terrified of being called a feminist for fear that someone is going to assume they have hairy legs and wear flannel. God forbid a Black woman stands up and says, I am a woman and I am a feminist.

Feminists work to dismantle the social, political, and economic disparity between the genders. Feminists aren’t lesbians, although they can be, feminists don’t hate men although we certainly have a right to hate their privilege. Feminists aren’t “against the family,” as so many Black women want to imply. Feminists simply take a stand against the oppression and tyranny of women under the auspices of men being somehow inherently superior. Black women weaken our movement by catering to the irrational fears of Black men. You can not be a warrior in the struggle if you are starting your crusade from a place of concession. If you refer to yourself as a womanist, you’ve already said to the world, “I don’t want to be equal to men because I don’t want them mad at me for being a feminist.”