• • • low end theory

Courses that focus on issues which concretely and materially affect Black women are ideally what Black women’s studies/feminist studies should be about. Courses should examine such topics as the sexual violence we suffer in our own communities; the development of Black feminist economic analysis that will reveal for the first time Black women’s relationship to American capitalism; the situation of black women in prison and the connection between their incarceration and our own; the social history of Black women’s mental and physical health in a society whose “final solution for us and our children is death.

It is important to consider also that although much research about these issues needs to be done, much insight about them can be arrived at through studying the literary and historical documents that already exist. Anyone familiar with Black literature and Black women writers should be able to develop a course on rape, battering, and incest as viewed by Black female and male authors. Analysis of these patriarchal crimes could be obtained from the substantial body of women’s movement literature on the subject of violence against women, some of which would need be criticized for its conscious and unconscious racism.

From Gloria T. (later Akasha) Hull and Barbara Smith, “Introduction: The Politics of Black Women’s Studies.” In All the Blacks Are Men, All the Women Are White, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (1982).

What a thought, you know? The notion that you could do real, worthwhile research on black women’s relationships to gendered and sexual violence, capitalism, and incarceration by investigating literature and activist documents? Rather than proceeding directly to quantitative data or the authority of science? Rather than assuming that numbers and the professionalized discourse that produces them can represent the depth, scope, and contours of a problem better than people on the ground, or people equipped with well-trained imaginations?

Or the thought that the people doing quantitative, “scientific” work would imagine, as a matter of course, that in order to do this kind of work they would need to have a grounding in, and to be answerable to, the questions, problems, and strategies raised by writers and activists?

What a thought, you know?