Declaring the activism of black feminist theory

This paper explores the ways in which declaring the activism of Black feminist theory troubles knowledge power relations, silence and hierarchical thinking. The Rape Crisis movement (rapecrisis.org.uk) has been instrumental shaping my standpoint and work as a Black feminist activist. Throughout this journey, the political writings of Black feminist activist scholars such as Audre Lorde have and continue to be an anchor in the tasks such as: • ‘[T]he transformation of silence into language and action’ (Lorde, 1977:40); • Working in feminist collective structures that resist patriarchal hierarchies whilst fulfilling the requirements of governance structures; the formulation of Black feminist governance.Establishing and sustaining Black women-only feminist support services, training and Black womenonly feminist consciousness-raising spaces in the context of a Rape Crisis centres constituted of Black and white women; • Attending to the specificity of the experience of difference whilst attending to the indeterminacy of difference. Working with Avtar Brah’s question, ‘[a]t what point, and in what ways, for example, does the specificity of a particular social experience become an expression of essentialism? (Brah, 1996:95); • Maintaining a feminist praxis where feminist reflective processes and internal and external practical service delivery demands are mutually constitutive creating an inherent balance between doing and thinking; • Remaining steadfast in our mission to form strategies of antiracist, anti-homophobic, anti-imperialist anti-capitalist feminist resistance whilst dealing with ‘that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships’ (Lorde, 1980:123)