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, “Well, I don’t really hate men so I consider myself a womanist.” Emasculating or hating men has NEVER been the agenda of feminists, that's nothing but bullshit rhetoric from immature and insecure men who want to keep women silenced and maintain their privilege of oppression. Then you hear the argument, “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 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. If there was ever an opportunity to help white women understand our plight as Black women, womanist shut the door on that by not allowing them the opportunity to learn and grow from exposure to us. White women are capable of understanding our plight if we explain it to them. Will they take up our banner as diligently? No, nor should they.
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. Ask a Black woman, “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 this Black womanist movement isn’t being particularly effective, is it? 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.
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 men want to imply.
Feminists simply take a stand against the oppression and tyranny of women under the false assumption of men being somehow inherently superior.
You lessen your position of power if you refuse to face Black men head on with their misogyny and you attempt to side step them by using a more neutral term that they don't object to. just because you want the world to know that you want a man. 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 too radical.” Womanism is not the lite version of feminists, it's not the Black version of feminists, it's the patriarchal conformation to Black men's insecurities.
If there is a platform upon which we can stand and unite, all women, it is the feminist one which states that we will be seen as human beings and not objects, that we serve a greater role in the world than doing housework, being mothers, and being receptacles for sperm to satisfy men’s lust. We are individuals with equal strengths to bring to the table as men. They are not the same strengths, but they are equal nonetheless.
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