ABSTRACT
The experiences of African-American women scholars illustrate how individuals who wish to rearticulate a Black women’s standpoint through Black feminist thought can be suppressed by prevailing knowledge validation processes. An ethic of personal accountability also characterizes Black feminist epistemology. In the United States, the social institutions that legitimate knowledge as well as the Western or Eurocentric epistemologies that they uphold constitute two interrelated parts of the dominant knowledge validation processes. White women, African-American men and women, and other people of color may be enlisted to enforce these connections between power relations and what counts as truth. Some feminist scholars claim that women as a group are more likely than men to use lived experiences in assessing knowledge claims. For Black women who are agents of knowledge within academia, the marginality that accompanies outsider-within status can be the source of both frustration and creativity.
