AP Research- Using Feminist Pedagogy (10)

Throughout my education, I have been extremely interested in Black history and Black studies. My great grandfather was a Black cowboy, and thus a member of an infamous group in history who helped shape this nation, but a history that not many people know about. Now his son, my grandfather, grew up in the deep South amidst segregation and extremely blatant racism, and then in his young adult life, went on to fight in the Vietnam War, which was the first American war in which the army was desegregated. It was with this in mind that I started doing my own research about Black history, reading all kinds of works related to different topics. But one thing I realized almost immediately, was the lack of intersectionality between the topics I was learning. As I was reading I would find myself “going down the rabbit hole” of Black history, looking up people and events I had never heard about before. As I was doing this, I realized that each historical event, scholar, and activist was connected, but there wasn’t much work that actually identified the connections between them. 

One of the things that piqued my interest was the role of Black women during the civil rights movement. I noticed that Black women were never really taught as actual leaders of the civil rights movement or the women’s movements of the 1960s, and there were people such as Angela Davis and Audre Lorde who have expansive bodies of work that cover topics even beyond these movements. This focus is something I knew I wanted to conduct my research on, because the work of these women could be taught through many different avenues, but they weren’t. As I went on to learn more about Black women in the civil rights movement, and had an interest in discovering more about what my grandfather might have experienced as a Black soldier in the Vietnam War, I realized that there was as single thread where these two demographics intersected, and that was the fact that they both have been essentially excluded from mainstream Black American history and U.S. history overall. This is where I came to identify my gap. Because while there was research on Black male soldiers in Vietnam, and there was research on Black women in the Civil Rights movements, I couldn’t find anything that pointed to how these groups were connected, especially as these events were occurring simultaneously within the Black American diaspora in different parts of the globe. With the knowledge of how intersectional the scholarly work of Black women was, I realized that this could be a significant framework for drawing parallels between these two very different yet similar experiences, which led me to my question…

How can feminist pedagogy be used to connect the experiences of Black women in the Civil Rights Movement and Black soldiers in the Vietnam War?

To situate this in a historical context, I used three particular articles. First is an article from political science professor Evelyn M. Simien, who specializes in race and gender studies. This article aims to address the limitations of studying race and gender as separate categories. Simien emphasizes that it is critical to understand that because of this, Black women have been theoretically erased from literature on group consciousness. According to this article, Black feminist consciousness arises from an understanding of intersecting patterns of discrimination. Contemporary literature on feminist consciousness has been focused on the women’s liberation movement and its ability to create strong bonds, raise awareness, and link consciousness as political activism. 

Black women often have to choose between fighting for antiracism and antisexism. One example of this cited in the article is the Million Man March of 1995, where Black women had to decide if they should support a gender-exclusive racial liberation movement, facing the ultimate question of whether to choose race over gender. Now to tie this back to the purpose of my research, we can see with this article the dilemma that occurs for people who have multiple intersecting identities of marginalization. Furthermore, such as with the Million Man March, we can see how studying historical events without using an intersectional lens can lead to the erasure of certain populations, particularly women, which is why I sought to discover how feminism itself can be used as a tool to embody that intersectional lens.

Next, a study from Catherine E. Harnois examines the role of Black women and Black men in relation to each other. Harnois argues that because of their position within the intersecting hierarchies of race, gender, and class, Black women as a collective possess a “unique angle of vision” on the social world, also known as “the Black women’s standpoint”. Rooted in the everyday experiences of Black women, the Black women’s standpoint is marked by an intersectional understanding of oppression and the legacy of struggle against this oppression. The researcher in this study employs a quantitative analysis of data from the 1992 National Survey of Black Americans and the 2004/2005 National Black Feminist Study to investigate the Black women’s standpoint. This study was significant to my research because it provided the background knowledge of the kinds of literature present in the current sphere of race and gender studies and provided insight to what is missing from this work. 

The final document that was a critical turning point in my research while conducting my Literature Review was a 2015 journal article from Latoya Johnson titled, “From the Anti-Slavery Movement to Now: (RE) Examining the Relationship between Critical Race Theory and Black Feminist Thought”. This study uses a historical theoretical analysis to identify the points where Black Feminist Thought and Critical Race Theory “intersect” and “separate”. In this context, points of intersection identify where the two bodies of knowledge share commonalities, and points of separation are what expose their distinctions. 

The history of Critical Race Theory and Black Feminist Thought and the points of intersection and separation identified in this study are significant because they led me to the first step of my research process and that is identifying what key characteristics can be used to define the “feminist pedagogy”. In diving further into this, I want to reiterate my original question: How can feminist pedagogy be used to connect the experiences of Black women in the Civil Rights Movement and Black soldiers in the Vietnam War? 

In order to conduct my research, I essentially broke this question down into three parts: 

-What exactly is feminist pedagogy? 

-What were the experiences of Black women in the Civil Rights Movement? 

-What were the experiences of Black soldiers in the Vietnam War? 

By dividing this question into three specific parts, I began to collect my data. For my research approach I modeled the method used in Latoya Johnson’s study of Black Feminist Thought and Critical Race Theory, and used a historical theoretical approach, collecting nonexperimental qualitative data, to examine the relationship between Black women in the Civil Rights Movement and Black soldiers in the Vietnam War. 

Using pre-existing work on Feminist Theory, I conducted a thorough analysis to understand the experiences of Black Women and Black soldiers from the late 1950s-early 1970s. I collected studies whose purpose was specifically to identify the behaviors, attitudes, and feelings of these two demographics within the respective historical events, i.e. the role of women in the Civil Rights movement and the role of Black soldiers in Vietnam. 

This method was most effective for my question because it opened up opportunities to utilize data that I would not have been able to collect myself. For example, if I were to have interviewed Black veterans who fought in Vietnam, I could have run into ethical dilemmas and inaccuracies due to physical or mental health issues, minimal recollection of events, or unwillingness to participate since this event and experience was deeply personal and both physically and emotionally demanding. Furthermore, I would have been limited in the scope of participants I would have been able to find for both demographics due to personal privacy, geographical location, and especially the COVID Pandemic. Furthermore, my limited time and resources would have made it extremely difficult to locate individuals who fall within these demographics, considering they would be dispersed across the nation and at different levels of abilities and participation.  

However, it is important for me to note that there were limitations in using this method. The most prominent one would be that the only research I could collect was within the databases I had access to, especially since this was a historical analysis. This means that the data set could be considered incomplete. Furthermore, a qualitative approach meant that it was mostly subjective especially because of the emotional nature of this topic as mentioned earlier. 

However, to combat this and increase the accuracy as much as possible, I made sure to read through a wide variety of resources in order to collect a data set that was comprehensive, and made sure to check the reliability of these sources by making sure there was consistency across the qualitative data and any numerical statistics I came across. 

In defining feminist pedagogy, I specifically looked for themes in Black Feminist literature, because this is where I could find the most intersectional interpretations of feminism due to the exclusivity of other branches of feminism. The two primary sources I drew the bulk of my information from was an essay by Michelle M. Wright titled “Feminism” in a book called Keywords for African American Studies, and from the journal article mentioned earlier, “From the Anti-Slavery Movement to Now: (RE) Examining the Relationship between Critical Race Theory and Black Feminist Thought”. 

Black Feminist Thought serves a sort of vehicle for feminist pedagogy in which to manifest itself. It  is derived from Black women’s communal knowledge from shared experiences and intersections of oppression across the United States. The ‘intersections of oppression’ component is a significant factor in tying the experiences of Black soldiers in the Vietnam War and Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement. Black feminist thought consists of two interdependent types of knowledge: the first is the knowledge shared collectively by Black women deriving from everyday thoughts and actions, and the second is the knowledge provided by Black women experts or specialists who come from different social or educational backgrounds. This is significant because it can of course relate to the experiences of Black women in the Civil Rights Movement and how these two distinct types of knowledge make up the body of work, but it is also significant because these types of knowledge are consistent with the bodies of knowledge on Black soldiers and their experiences in the Vietnam War. 

There are 6 distinctive features of Black Feminist Thought (BFT), according to Latoya Johnson:

1. Recognition of how the ties between experience and consciousness impact the everyday lives of individual black women and women as a collective 

2. Black women’s diverse responses to oppression 

3. Black women are both activists and scholars who aim to merge action and theory 

4. Black feminist thought draws upon the different dialogical practices of black women 

5. The body of knowledge changes as social conditions change 

6. BFT recognizes the importance of social justice not just for Black women but for all humans

One of the primary reasons why Black feminism and Black Feminist Thought was the ideal theoretical approach to draw connections in my research is that the concept of Black feminism is multidimensional. Intersectionality has been used as a key tool of Black feminism in practice to bring together how Black women are seen and treated versus how they view themselves. This is important for the broader scope of my research as the goal is to discover how to close this gap when it comes to teaching intersections of oppression in relation to significant events in Black American history. Furthermore, Black feminism strives to fight against the idea that all Black people are equally disenfranchised because of racism regardless of their individual social, economic, and political privileges. To do this, Black feminists encourage others to look outward at racist oppression and within their own communities where patriarchal systems were held up to be normal.

These points are particularly significant when it comes to the experiences of Black soldiers. The bulk of my research in evaluating the Black soldiers came from a journal article written by William King titled “Our Men in Vietnam: Black Media as a Source of the Afro-American Experience in Southeast Asia”. 

This source was the most significant in evaluating the experiences of Black soldiers in the Vietnam war because it provides excerpts from letters written in Sepia magazine’s special column, “Our Men in Vietnam”, focused on the Black experience in the Vietnam War starting in August 1966 and appearing in the monthly magazine through the end of the war. 

Despite the unique individualized experiences of each Black soldier who fought in Vietnam, the submissions to Sepia magazine reveal repetitive themes that were present throughout the collective experience. The most prominent themes were racism in the military, which was manifested in assignment policies, promotions practices, or awards criteria; the contradiction between Black men fighting for the freedom of the South Vietnamese at a time where Black people did not enjoy those same freedoms at home in the U.S.; concern with domestic matters, particularly the treatment of Black people and Black veterans; and antiwar protests and the rise of Black power. 

Although not specifically stated in the original study, I also concluded that there were ideas and themes of unity, inclusivity, and division within and amongst the Black and white soldiers in Vietnam, but it was also tied with a necessity to rely on each other due to the inherent circumstances of war. 

In aligning these themes with the pedagogy of Black feminism and Black Feminist Thought, we can see an overlap of an emphasis on community, looking outward and internally at forms of oppression, fighting against the idea that all Black people are treated equally, experiences as knowledge, and the body of knowledge changing as social conditions change. 

When looking at the experiences of Black women in the Civil Rights Movement, we can see these same themes present in different ways. In my research of the Black woman’s experience in the Civil Rights Movement, there was no one particular source that provided all the information I was looking for. Instead, I looked at multiple sources ranging from research studies, journal articles, and historical theoretical evaluations, and made sure that the sources I used and experiences I drew from were in agreement with each other. While it is true that not all experiences were the same, the goal was to discover the ways in which Black women were actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement, because in contemporary teachings of history they have been left out. 

From the research I collected I found that there were multiple different “archetypes” which I will not go deeply into today for the sake of time, but they show that Black women existed within every aspect of the movement, from grassroots organization and mobilizing the base, to being caretakers of protesters and families, and leading protests themselves directly. Each of the “roles” held by Black women in the movement can directly correlate back to the 6 pillars of Black feminist thought, particularly because they are the embodiment of multidimensionalism and intersectionality.

William M. King writes that the best way to make meaning out of the excerpts provided in Sepia magazine is with an “Afrocentric orientation whose worldview, normative assumptions, and frames of reference flow out of the historical experiences and folk wisdom of Black people”. 

He writes that it is a fundamental truth of the Afrocentric perspective that knowledge does not have an independent existence; it is a social product, not an objective ideal that can be possessed, owned, or brought in from the outside. Knowledge is “information that has been organized for some specific purpose whose intent is implicit in the organizational design”

He goes on, “the black experience in America goes to the very core of what this society is said to be about, to its founding concepts of freedom, equality, liberty and justice for all, especially in time of war, much is to be gained by examining that experience from the perspectives of the persons who lived it”.

 This quote was particularly meaningful to my research because it provides further evidence as to why primary accounts of Black people’s experiences are critical in order to understand how different historical eras and events influenced how they navigated through systems of oppression. 

As mentioned earlier, my research is meant to serve as a body of work that helps bring light to the issues that are typically left out of the fields of studying American history and Black history. It is not intended to speculate or necessarily analyze Black people as a whole, rather I hope it helps to relay the harsh realities of those groups who are left behind and left out of history, while also showing the importance of analyzing history with an intersectional lens, proving that despite the significant differences in systems of oppression, the commonalities can help people eliminate them and take the steps for a more equitable society. 

Gabriella S. Hoard