ABSTRACT
Exploring and challenging the connections and intersections between community-centered and academic-centered intellectualisms, women embrace or rebel against roles as community caretakers. With intellectualism as academic, hooks divorces community caretakers from intellectual production. Rather than address the skewed value system of academic intellectualism that mandates hierarchies, individualism, and images of worth tied to the production of literary commodities, "Black Women Intellectuals" focuses on what are presented as deficiencies in black women's sensibilities. If "everyday language" is incompetent to communicate black feminist thought's liberation message, nonelite communities as well as community caretakers are captive to academics. Reagon constructs community caretakers as intellectuals who apprentice in black communities; here, training is also a central concept. The essay particularizes its argument to the public intellectual, specifically the activist in the Southern civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s who challenged the social constraints and state violence directed against blacks.
