Insurgent Black Feminism and the Black Radical Tradition in the U.S. and Beyond

Racial formation(s) and patriarchy are deeply embricated in a transnational, technologically-driven capitalist world order. These are historical formations. Moreover, there is an ideological structure of racialization intertwined with the gender division of labor under global capital. Given these realities, the focus of this analysis is the deep economic and social dispossession of Black working class and poor women in the late capitalist United States and the global capitalist world in which women of Africa and African diaspora are enmeshed. The radical responses to this dispossession are discussed. Black working class women in the U.S. and globally have been profoundly impacted by the dismantling of the social wage, attacks on public education, and state violence, structured by the global politics of accumulation and capitalist crisis. Black women have not sit quietly by during these tumultuous times; nor historically.

The analysis focuses on Black women’s historic upsurges such as the Combahee River Collective, the women of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and the women led Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. and across the African diaspora. Linkages have been forged between Black women in the U.S. and women in Africa and the African diaspora. This is especially the case given the impact of Black Lives Matter internationally. Black women in South Africa, Britain, and Canada are building movements through intersectional struggles rooted in race, class, gender/sexuality impacted by Black Lives Matter in the U.S. The emergence of this cross national movement building, rooted in an insurgent Black feminism, is critically interrogated in the discussion.