I had a difficult time grappling with the concepts presented by Patricia Hill Collins in her chapter “Black Feminist Epistemology,” from her book Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. While I am sympathetic to questioning knowledge sources and critically examining the sources of what we take to be knowledge, at the same time I am not sure I understand using personal narrative as a sufficient alternative. It seems like an extremely valuable tool for understanding the experiences of individual women, and perhaps drawing connections between the similarities in different narratives, but I am not sure I understand or agree with her assessment that “the universal comes from the particular” (Giovanni, 268). The particular seems particular precisely because it is so particular and subjective, so I do not understand how this extends to a universal.
Part of the issue with drawing universals out from personal narrative, to me, is that it seems to presuppose that something universal is to be found in the narratives, that there is something all Black women (in this case) share. But Collins writes herself that Black women academics (who are themselves a very specific subset of Black women) are a “heterogeneous collectivity” (267), and also discusses the “belief in individual uniqueness” (263) found in African American communities and quotes a woman, Johnetta Ray, who said that “No matter how hard we try, I don’t think black people will ever develop much of a herd instinct. We are profound individualists with a passion for self-expression” (263). How is it then that personal narrative and experience can give knowledge about more than just that personal experience, unless it is also combined with other forms of epistemology to give a more holistic account?
Another thing that seemed problematic to me is how the “ethic of caring” functions. If “personal expressiveness, emotions, and empathy are central parts of the knowledge validation process” (263), where does this leave the knowledge of individuals who may be lacking in one or more of these categories. TMany individuals with Asperger’s Syndrome (a form of high functioning Autism) do become intellectuals or academics, due to their propensity to seek facts. However, they usually lack or at least struggle with empathy, and also struggle with personal expressiveness or expressing their emotions in an acceptable way. Where does an epistemology like this leave those individuals—if a Black woman like this seeks knowledge in a way that does align with a more traditional and institutionalized epistemology, would she be considered to be letting down her fellow Black women because she is not participating in their emotion-based process of knowledge validation?
Critical race theory 