The level of violence that black women suffer is mind-boggling. When writing about the murder of Kasandra Perkins, Gina McCauley used data from the CDC to quantify what black women are facing: “According to the CDC, black women have a maternal homicide risk about seven times that of white women. Black women ages 25-29 are about 11 times more likely as white women in that age group to be murdered while pregnant or in the year after childbirth.

Feminism provides a framework from which to understand the widespread violence used against black women to both exploit them, punish them, and to keep them in their place. Feminism from a black female perspective tackles the issue of the disintegration of the family in black communities and the effect that disintegration has had on black women. Feminism gives black women a theory (multiple theories, actually) to hang her hat on in an attempt to understand why lower class black people behave in certain ways and why black men and women have so many problems relating to one another.

Without any sort of framework to ground your understanding of black male/female relations and to examine the violence that is perpetrated against black women, you are left to disparage the “crazy” behavior of lower class black people by calling them all types of names and declaring that those ghetto black folks needs to stop acting that way—but you offer no solutions and you aren’t saying anything that anyone with two eyes doesn’t already know. All you offer is criticism, but you lack the ability to analyze, meaningfully critique, and provide solutions.

Can black women and white feminists agree on anything?

Many Black women are jealous and envious of white women. Whereas white feminists were angry and resentful about the limitations that patriarchy put upon them while simultaneously holding them up as the ideal of womanhood, black women were wishing that they could be up on that pedestal instead of cooking and cleaning as a domestic in the homes of white families. According to black women, white women actually had a good deal but they were too privileged to appreciate it. When white women were talking about wanting to go to work, they were thinking about professional careers which would allow them the full expression of their creative faculties—to many black women, work meant menial, rote labor which kept then away from their families and away from the care and upkeep of their homes. Viewed from these opposing perspectives, it is understandable why lower and working-class black women were not as vocally supportive as the average white woman of calls to enter the workforce and leave the home, especially when many black women were already in the workforce and not happy about it.

Because black women are in a very specific bind with respect to certain issues, when black women choose to participate in the group conversation we call feminism they are adding a depth and perspective to the discussion that would not have been there otherwise.