The Birth of Black Feminism

30 September 2024

Anna Julia Cooper was only the fourth African American person in history to earn a PhD, after having been born into slavery. She went on to write A Voice from the South (1892), a landmark book which influenced later thinkers such as Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois. Among other things, it anticipated Du Bois's discussion of “double consciousness”: in a racist society, she wrote, Black people can easily end up seeing themselves through the eyes of their oppressors. You see yourself not just your own way but also someone else’s way (hence the term "double consciousness"), and that can be hugely demoralizing.

Cooper also anticipated Du Bois’s idea that liberal education should be available to everyone. She didn’t think it was enough to send Black kids to vocational training, even if it would get them a good job; she thought they deserved access to the life of mind. And she practiced what she preached: as a high school teacher herself for many years, at a public school in Washington, DC, she offered a classical education to generations of kids. And she got results, with many of her students getting into prestigious schools like Princeton and Harvard.

But does everyone need to learn Greek and Latin? If someone's talents lie in carpentry or engineering, should we force them to read Homer? Plenty of people have no particular interest in classical languages; maybe the one-size-fits-all classical education idea is just snobbery. As Booker T. Washington put it, “no race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.” Still, Du Bois had a devastating counter to that: “the true college will ever have one goal—not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.”

Cooper herself saw both sides of the argument. She was really keen to make the full range of knowledge accessible to anyone who wanted it: in her view, everyone should at least have the chance to learn the classics, and those chances shouldn’t be based on race. At the same time, “if a boy hates Greek and Latin and spends all his time whittling out steamboats, it is rather foolish to try to force him into the classics.” 

Cooper was also ahead of her time in thinking about how race and gender intersect, and was actually quite critical of some Black leaders for only paying attention to the problems they faced as men and leaving women behind. She believed that Black women deserved a public voice and shouldn’t be confined to the home. Indeed, if women did get out into the public sphere, they weren’t just doing themselves a favor—they were doing everyone a favor. In Cooper’s view, Black women can see things about society that nobody else can, so all of us—whatever our race or gender—desperately need their voices. That's an insight that anticiaptes a whole field of philosophy today known as "standpoint epistemology."

In her long and impressive life, Cooper witnessed Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights movement. Throughout, she contributed brilliant insights, questions, and methodologies to the world of thought. We'll talk about her pioneering ideas with our guest, Kathyn Sophia Belle, founding director of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers.

 

 

Comments (7)


trossard's picture

trossard

Thursday, October 24, 2024 -- 2:46 AM

What were Cooper's main

What were Cooper's main criticisms of the Black leadership of her time, and how did she envision a more inclusive and equitable movement?

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Wednesday, November 6, 2024 -- 11:18 PM

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NeugierZone's picture

NeugierZone

Thursday, November 21, 2024 -- 8:25 PM

It delves into the historical

It delves into the historical roots and evolution of Black feminism, highlighting key figures and movements that have shaped its development.

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