Black Feminist Thought

Clareese Hill, an artist that works with various creative technological outputs, gave a guest lecture today that opened my mind to world of black female bodies taking up space in traditionally white male environments. The field of technology and the various sub-genres spawned are synonymous and flooded with white male supremacy. These structures are echoed in a variety of ways, Safiya Umoja Noble’s suggests ‘a range of digital technologies are embedded with intersectional and uneven power relations’. On a very basic level this shares the same the sentiment as the 2018 H&M debacle. H&M had a black boy under 10 years old in a green hoody with the slogan ‘coolest monkey in the jungle’.  If rooms where decisions are made continuously neglect to include differing, opposing or widening perspectives then insensitive and off-colour materials will continuously be produced.  

During the lecture Hill touched on a concept I had never heard of but was instantly drawn towards, Hood Feminism. As a Black woman who understands the hurts and connotations attached to the word ‘hood’ as well as the segregation felt in the ‘word’ feminism I immediately assumed Hood Feminism was a way to reclaim and assert power in all things deemed ‘hood’. But it much more than that.  

I also understand that Black Feminism and Womanism can be considered problematic and unnecessary as separation in times hardship are often times frowned upon. Common critique against the movement is that feminism is already anti-racist, what is the need for the separation considering all women will benefit from feminism and the work done here? And this is something I continuously grapple with as I do not use any title, fundamentally I believe in the liberation of women and women's equality but subsequent actions and beliefs I do not. With that being said, people are complex and beliefs should be able to echo this with no judgement. As an African woman my perspectives are heavily influences by this, thus my views on how I carry out feminism and ultimately interact with other African men who aren't as receptive to equality are nuanced. My African heritage also influences my emotional attachment to reading about the pillaging of Africa in the section titled ‘The New Scramble for Africa: An Intersectional Analysis of the IT Sector’. Noble informs us of the of how ‘black lives are engaged in some of the most treacherous labor essential to the growth and proliferation of the internet’ with the mining of Coltan. Coltan, ‘short for columbite-tantalite, is a mineral, more potent than steel which is needed for computers and electronics to release electrical charges in small capacitors’. The constant need for control and a continuous flurry of tech in the west are the reasons for the concealed ‘rape, violence, and loss of human life’ and sometimes funded wars in Africa. My skin colour also influences my views on the misrepresentation of black women. Nobel talks about search engines being used as a new age tool to perpetuate racist narratives in order to keep undermining the black life.  noble goes on to suggests that the hypersexualisiation of black girl and boys in google searches and other things of this nature have ties ’to the real-world circumstances that demean the value of Black women’s lives, and these images serve as justification for systemic exclusion and oppression’.  

 A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies (no date). Available at: http://sfonline.barnard.edu/traversing-technologies/safiya-umoja-noble-a-future-for-intersectional-black-feminist-technology-studies/ (Accessed: 28 January 2020).