Response

Abstract

Response Stephanie Y. Mitchem (bio) I am grateful to Monica Coleman for her article, because she raises the lingering questions of black women's academic and intellectual identities. Her questions bring me to moments of reflection and analysis, including a closer look at myself, my professional path, and the "state" of academe. What follows is a theological reflection inspired by Coleman's question, "Must I be womanist?" I did not come to academe by way of my initial undergraduate experiences. In fact, in the 1970s I dropped out of a public college in Michigan that had improved racism to a fine art. I moved away from the academic and was committed to leading an activist life, sometimes in church settings, sometimes not. At different times, I was involved in providing counseling and community education. Slowly, I moved to the administrative side, such as managing grants and performing political advocacy. The time came, however, when I went back to academe. It was, now that I think about it, a natural progression. How could I integrate different areas of my life while continuing to grow? What had I learned from my activist life? How could I lend a greater weight of authority to my words? [End Page 123] Yet, I did not return to the academy expecting a perfect world, one without conflict. Further, with my activist mind-set, my eyes were open to see areas of contention and weakness and to act as an agent of change when possible. So I am baffled when I read Coleman's words, as a representative of third-wave feminists, with questions about the status quo and the efficiency of their predecessors. What did she and third wavers expect to find in the academic world? But I get ahead of myself here. There were points throughout my returning undergraduate and later master's-level studies, in the 1980s, when I encountered professors who did not know of any black women who wrote in any religious field. But they knew of many white American women writing about everything. I read many of these white women's books with dismay when the words did not wrap around my black, working-class woman's experiences, often resonating with the question attributed to Sojourner Truth: "Ain't I a woman?" The professors' ignorance shaped my future studies, lending a new passion to my desire to end, specifi cally, the silencing of black women on too many levels of academe and, generally, the rejection of black scholarship's legitimacy. During my doctoral work, I was able to blend religious studies with anthropology, ethnography, American history, and ethics in order to explore the religiosity of black women. Womanist thought was the arena to which I gravitated with my disciplinary base in theology. Womanist thought was also the arena in which my activist mind could identify continuing ways to engage other black women. Yet when I work with black women in other disciplines—particularly history, sociology, or anthropology—I use the term "black feminist" to describe my approach. This is strategic, as the black women scholars in these disciplines understand their work under the name black feminism. These black feminists are the ones from whom I learn. I do not fi nd such usage of different terms a form of doublethink; I do not experience any kind of cognitive dissonance. Instead, I understand womanist and black feminist thought to fall along a continuum following the ideas of cultural theorist and black feminist Joy James: "To some degree then, we can distinguish between a conventional feminism embraceable by all progressive women, including those who happen to be black, and a black feminism or womanism, one particular to women of African descent."1 James's view defi nes feminism, black feminism, and womanism in nonconflictual terms. It is not necessary, with such an understanding, to anguish over whether one is black feminist or womanist or generic feminist. Frankly, ranges of intellectual stances are found within each grouping. This diversity of women's voices is welcome to me; I am afraid of any group of people parroting the same phrases with the same infl ections. (The idea that such a firm unanimity can exist reminds...