At Radcliffe Panel, Scholars Say Academia Must Not Marginalize Black Women

Black women scholars are often marginalized—and the study of black women is an afterthought—in the academy today, according to a group of panelists who spoke at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Friday.

“Even in the best of times, America is tough on blacks, tough on women, and tough on black women scholars,” said Nell I. Painter, a professor of American history at Princeton University. “The field of black women’s history is flourishing, but I worry deeply about the toilers. Black women scholars are in danger.”

Painter was one of six panelists who spoke at a roundtable discussion titled “Gender and Race: Together at Last.”

More than 400 people attended the panel, which was part of the full-day “Gender, Race and Rights in African American Women’s History” conference, which honored the 60th anniversary of Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library.

In the 1980s, Painter said, academia welcomed women grudgingly.

“African-American studies was all about black men and Women’s Studies was all about white women,” she said.

Though she said “black women are in positions that black women have never been in before,” Painter noted that higher education remains a stressful environment for African-American women.

“There are two kinds of stressors: white men who say black women got their job because they are black women and black men and sexual harassment,” she said.

Painter said prizes for published work are one arena that still needs to change, arguing that black women are rarely recognized for their scholarship.

Deborah G. White, a professor of history at Rutgers University who also spoke on the panel, said the changes that have taken place in academic publishing are only a first step.

“We have a whole new vocabulary to speak of difference, and the publishers no longer ask us if there is an audience,” she said. “But some things have only been altered. There still seems to be a wonderment for African-Americans who don’t study African-Americans.”

She also noted that many academics assume that African-American studies is an easier field for black scholars than white scholars.

“Some people think I came by my knowledge by osmosis, being black made it easier for me,” she said.

Other panelists said they were more optimistic about the place of black women in the academy and the study of black women.

Harvard professor of history and Afro-American Studies Evelyn B. Higginbotham praised the progress of the field.

“It is exciting to see African-American women inserted in texts when I know they would not have been in the past,” she said.

But she noted that there is considerable room for further scholarship in African-American women’s studies.

Higginbotham expressed particular interest in the Caribbean influx in America.

“For the students of color at Harvard, most of them are of Caribbean descent and African descent,” she said, noting that African-American students are in the minority of black students here.

She called for uniting “global women of color” through scholarship.

“We need to meticulously explore patriarchy, color, capitalism, and racism in the perpetuation of sexual exploitation,” she added.

Darlene C. Hine, an American history professor at Michigan State University and a Radcliffe Fellow this year, also outlined the future of black women’s history scholarship, noting that the field should focus on inferiority and internationalism.

She also encouraged the publishing of more biographies and testimonies. “We simply do not have enough black women’s stories,” she said.

At the discussion, Dean of the Radcliffe Institute Drew Gilpin Faust announced the Schlesinger Library’s acquisition of the papers of June Jordan, an African-American writer and activist who died last year.

“This is a major addition to our collection and to the record of the experience of women in America,” she said.

The papers were acquired with the help of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African American Research and include Jordan’s correspondences with well-known writers like Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker.