I discussed Ida B. Wells-Barnet and Anna Julia Cooper for the first short paper. These women made significant contributions to the field of sociology and had a great deal of intersectionality. They were able to convey ideas through the eyes of the oppressed there by providing a truly emic perspective on injustice. Additionally, these women conducted their activism in very similar fashions.
Wells-Barnet and Cooper, as black women, both experienced prejudice firsthand. Wells-Barnet was instructed to move from her current car to the smoking car after segregation was declared constitutional. She refused to move and, in so doing, gained support from the African American Community. She then focused her attention on the injustice of lynching that she had witnessed first-hand. Cooper first experienced prejudice when she was in school and noticed that the male students were given money to attend schools but the female students had to find their own way. Wells-Barnet and Cooper took their experience and their social position and used it to their advantage to give an emic perspective.
Both of these women also believed that in order to understand people you need to understand what morals and laws are guiding their actions. Cooper derives her moral standard from her personal religious faith. Wells-Barnet derives her moral standard from our democratic principles and declared that the United States Government was full of hypocrites, stating that these people have moral laws, yet fail to follow them.
Both of these women used the terms ‘dominants’ and ‘oppressed’ to describe our society. They argued that the dominants were mainly white men while the oppressed were primarily the blacks. They both used the texts of the dominants to convict them. Cooper was particularly adept at using this tactic. At one point, she employed depictions of whites by a French historian, which described them as huge brute like creatures who were drunken killing machines, to show that their heritage was characterized by aggression. Cooper discusses the inaccuracy of the current day census. She points out that African Americans are shown in illiteracy accounts and crime accounts in the census data but rarely mentions more positive accounts like “mechanical products of the colored laborer” (2007:164).
As one can see, both of these women were successful in using the dominants literature, or lack of literature, to condemn the prevalent racism of their day. Wells-Barnet employed information on a Negro special needs man killing a four-year-old white girl although these charges were never proved. This was modestly covered by the New York Sun, but Wells-Barnet goes into full detail in her book A Red Record documenting the gruesome torture that this man endured with hot irons rolled down his body and multiple stabbings. She goes on to review lynching reports in Chicago, citing that four African American men were lynched simply because they did not know the whereabouts of another African American man who supposedly killed a white man. She continues to discuss how many of these lynching’s occurred even when there were no charges.
It is truly marvelous to see just how advanced these women were in arguing for racial justice. In anthropology the Emic perspective is a relatively recent phenomenon and these women were already using this to their advantage. Not only were they ahead of their time but these women demonstrated a level of bravery rarely seen. It is easy to be someone of the “dominant” class and speak out against society but to be an African American woman and speakout against lynching in the south? That takes immense courage and strength. The fact that these women were basically written out of history is sickening to me. It is unfortunate that to this day I feel a lot of their activism tactics are still necessary. We still need to harness the voices of the oppressed, and although people still use moral standards to make decisions, the United States Government is still (in my opinion) full of hypocrites. And last, we still need to use the voices of the dominant against them, by quoting politicians who have said terrible things and by reworking previous data. These women should be recognized as role models for activism and need to be included in any discussion about the male founders of sociology. They certainly have been a role model to me.
-Chelsea Cullen