Race, Gender, and the Black Women’s Standpoint

Abstract

Hill Collins (1997, 1998, 2000) argues that because of their position within the intersecting hierarchies of race, gender, and class, women as a group possess a unique angle of vision on the social world. Rooted in the everyday experiences of women, the black women's is marked by an intersectional understanding of oppression and a legacy of struggle against such oppression. In this article, I employ quantitative analyses of data from the National Survey of Black Americans (1992) and the National Black Feminist Study (2004-2005) to investigate the women's standpoint. I ask: Do women as a group tend toward the women's standpoint that Hill Collins describes? and Do women embrace this perspective more than men? Results from numerous χ 2 and logistic regression analyses suggest that, within the community, gender is not a significant predictor of the standpoint that Hill Collins describes, with men and women being equally likely to embrace many of the core ideas associated with the women's standpoint. I conclude by discussing the implications of this finding for gender and race-based standpoint theory.