?I Was [So] Busy Fighting Racism that I Didn't Even Know I Was Being Oppressed as a Woman!?: Challenges, Changes, and Empowerment in Teaching About Women of Color

Abstract

Studies as a discipline has undergone tremendous changes since its beginning in the 1970s, and it continues to transform in innovative ways. According to the 1999 National Studies Association (NWSA) Task Force, the issue of diversifying faculty and course offerings continues to be at the heart of the new initiatives of studies programs and departments across the country: Women's Studies has developed its theory base by examining the interconnected effects of race, class, sexuality, physical ability, region, and ethnicity on lives, and attracts a diverse range of students. Therefore, including as part of the core curriculum courses that bring racism, classism, homophobia, and other vectors of oppression into focus continues to hold priority in program development nationally (1999). Critical race theory (CRT) has both broadened and sharpened thought by diversifying studies curriculum. CRT began with several important premises that profoundly altered understanding of social reality: that racism is the norm, not the exception, in American society; that our current cultural construction of reality must be challenged with antiracist rhetoric and agenda; and, lastly, that liberalism must be critiqued for it may have done more good for whites than people of color (Delgado 1995). How all of these translate into pedagogy and thought is complex, but one of the most significant analytical results is the development of the intersectionality of different identities as a central site for examining the of women of color (Crenshaw 1997). As Angela P. Harris has argued, in a world where essentialism and racial essentialism exist, black will always be forcibly fragmented before being subjected to analysis, as those who are 'only interested in race' and those who are 'only interested in gender' take their separate slices of our lives (1995, 255; see also Crenshaw 1989). In other words, race and gender studied separately renders an incomplete understanding of the realities of women of color. Furthermore, those who maintain that there is a monolithic feminist or women's experience in the end only promote and embrace white voice and as the dominant narrative (Harris 1995, 256).