Racism, Black Women and the Teaching of Women's Studies

In March, 1979, with help from Afro-American Studies Professor Johnnetta Cole, Arlene Avakian organized a path-breaking two-day symposium, Racism, Black Women and the Teaching of Women’s Studies, in order to address the “lack of formal scholarly attention to Black and Third World women’s issues” in Women’s Studies.²⁸ Avakian had sat in on classes in the Afro-American Studies Department and had been in conversation with faculty there about the limitations in the Women’s Studies approach to issues of race.²⁹ The conference brought together faculty and students from UMass and the four colleges and featured a keynote address called “Dynamics of Racism,” by Michele Russell, an African American community organizer and theorist, and workshops and talks by Andrea Rushing, Amherst College; Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis, Hampshire College; Johnnetta Cole, UMass; and Nana Seshibe, a UMass graduate student in the School of Education, from South Africa. This conference marked the beginning of a decades long effort, sometimes highly contested and not always successful, to bring women of color and integrative feminist analysis to the center of the Women’s Studies program.

²⁸ Symposium Pamphlet, Women’s Studies archives.

²⁹ Arlene Avakian, “Women of Color in the Center: Transforming Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies,” 5.