Roundtable Discussion: Must i be Womanist?: Response

Abstract

Womanist scholars of religion have helped to create a place at the table for black women scholars and black women's studies within the Eurocentric disciplinary traditions of a male-dominated religious academy. Any conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of womanist religious studies must acknowledge a debt of gratitude to womanist pioneers. There now exists a substantive body of religious scholarship about black women's lives and religious faith, in part because of how these groundbreaking efforts have helped to carve out this intellectual legacy. It must also be remembered that the broader academic context of any conversation about womanist religious studies is shaped by historically rooted challenges of white supremacy. The mere fact that there is a need for a discussion of whether religious studies of black women and by black women scholars in religious fields can be located within varying schools of thought is a consequence of constraining white supremacist assumptions. Can you imagine a discussion about the appropriateness of assigning one analytical category to identify the work of all white religious scholars? There is something absurd and sad about the necessity to fight for the space in scholarly discourse and the academic job and publishing markets for a black woman scholar to be permitted to have more than one analytical label for her work. Yet it is indeed reflective of current realities. Monica Coleman's courageous article helps us to avoid the racist trap of obedience to black communal taboos on critical discussions of blacks "in front of whites." Critical discussions of womanist thought are healthy for the development of womanist religious studies. They signal freedom from bondage to the need to assert a singular, uniform voice of "the black community" in order to pierce the forms of racist disregard that blacks encounter in a white-dominated academy. I find myself in agreement with much of Coleman's insightful critique [End Page 128] of womanist religious studies, especially of its heteronormativity. Also, I resonate with Coleman's inquiries because I claim womanist religious scholarship as an essential resource and conversation partner but tend to identify myself as a black feminist. As I have written elsewhere, my feminist consciousness was awakened as a young adult by direct exposure to black feminist pioneers such as Michele Wallace, Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, Angela Davis, Beverly Smith, and Barbara Smith.1 The radical black lesbian feminism exhibited in the writings and activism of several of these women is precisely what most excited me. It provided language for many of my political, intellectual, and emotional yearnings. This burgeoning black feminism of my young adulthood was also developed through my exposure to white lesbian feminist and Latina lesbian feminist scholars. I have not found a compelling reason to abandon this pivotal black feminist foundation, no matter how many people in the religious academy have decided that all black women are now to be identified as womanists. (I suppose I should also confess my personality flaw of a stubborn, knee-jerk reaction of resistance whenever there is pressure to do something simply because "everybody" says it is the thing to do.) The distinction between black feminism and womanism has been blurred in several ways that militate against becoming too preoccupied with trying to capture it. As Coleman notes, the very first point in Alice Walker's defi nition of womanism describes a womanist as a black feminist.2 If Walker's 1983 defi nition is still the primary arbiter of the meaning of the term womanist for religious scholars, the effort to create a sharply differentiated dichotomy between the defi nition of black feminism and womanism is somewhat bogus. In fact, womanist Christian ethics and theology have often incorporated black feminist terminology and scholarship. Katie's Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (1995) includes Katie Cannon's essay "The Emergence of Black Feminist Consciousness" as one of the building blocks of Cannon's womanist method in Christian ethics that she lays out in that volume.3 One of the...