Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women by Brittney C. Cooper

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women by Brittney C. Cooper Kirsten T. Edwards Williams Brittney C. Cooper. Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 2017. 208 pp. Cloth: $95.00; Paperback: $19.95; ebook: $14.95. ISBN: 978-0-252-08248-1 When Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith published their groundbreaking text in 1982, it represented a century-long formulation of Black women's intellectual labor into one organized body of work. It aimed to not only solidify Black women's thought into a unified compendium, but to also put forth Black women's philosophical and political position as a rigorous unit worthy of substantive academic analysis. While All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave stands as a cornerstone text in Black women's studies, its legacy is of the continuing and not culminating variety. The edited collection marked not a conclusion to a long-fought battle, but one beginning to an ongoing war: the war of ideas fought on the battlefield of identity and power. For Hull and her colleagues, the fundamental problem hindering the progression of Black women's studies was/is the fallacious attempt by academics to map Black women's epistemic and ontological relationship to the world onto white1 male frames. These attempts support the "destructive" process of, categorizing all who are not like [white men] as their intellectual and moral inferiors. The [End Page E-8] fact that the works in which such oppressive images appear are nevertheless considered American "masterpieces" indicates the cultural-political value system in which Afro-American women have been forced to operate and which, when possible, they have actively opposed. (Hull, Scott, & Smith, 1982, p. xviii) The above assertion was not new to Black women, but needed to be formally articulated in text to speak to an oppressive academic context that theorized in ways that obscured and erased their influence. The authors' statement spoke not only to white masculinist dismissal of marginalized voices, but also to the foundational distinctions in Black women's ways of knowing and being in the world. These distinctions, if taken seriously, put into serious question the absolution of traditional logic. But Some of Us Are Brave, like the arguments made by Black women before them, additionally recognized the ways white feminist and Black male race theorists often utilized white patriarchal political and philosophical strategies to forward their liberation movements. Strategies that ignored the ways the body is "read as text" (Baszile, 2008, p. 252), therefore participating in (and often encouraging) the silencing of Black women. Since their earliest efforts to enter the public sphere of ideas, Black women have vigorously demanded intellectual analyses that took the body seriously. From Phillis Wheatley to Mary Church Terrell, bell hooks to Melissa Harris-Perry, embodied experience has been the lynchpin of political theorizing. Centering the body is a sharp departure from the predominant philosophical position predicated on the mind/body divide (Ani, 1994; Collins, 1990; Descartes, 1978); a departure that has longed placed Black women's theorizing squarely in the frame of the illogical, if not the un-reasonable. On one level these philosophical barriers have blocked Black women from accessing full humanity under the present terms of the social contract (Mills, 1997; Pateman, 1988). These blockades place Black women in perpetual vulnerability within the body politic fueling a literature base about Black women that has been primarily concerned with physical, mental, emotional, and economic survival. However, at a deeper level, white masculinist frames of logic have made "unvisible" (McKittrick, 2006) Black women's labor as intellectuals and their accompanying theoretical contributions (Baszile, Edwards, & Guillory, 2016). It is here, at the level of ideas that Brittney C. Cooper's formidable Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women enters the enduring conversation. As she alerts the reader on page one, the book is about "Black women as thinkers and intellectuals." Throughout the text, Cooper remains laser-focused on the distinctive avenues to and through social theory provided by Black women. Not abandoning an analysis of bodily vulnerability, like her predecessors, Cooper situates Black...