Critical Race Black Feminism: A “Jurisprudence of Resistance” and the Transformation of the Academy

Abstract

This article commemorates the twenty‐fifth anniversary of the black feminist classic All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave by examining the contributions of black feminists to the production of legal knowledge and black feminist criticism. For lawyers, and especially law professors, legal reasoning presents itself as the ultimate standard in intellectual achievement, a white masculinist posture that holds special challenges for black female lawyers and law professors, who are taken as the law’s embodied antithesis. I argue that black feminist legal theorists have produced what Cheryl I. Harris terms a “jurisprudence of resistance,” a jurisprudence that has fundamentally challenged the epistemological and methodological assumptions of the law and forced scholars and practitioners to take account of the unique social locations of black women qua black women in a wide range of legal and political contexts. More specifically, the article focuses attention on three distinct areas in which black feminist legal theorists have transformed the legal academy in particular and the academy more generally: critiquing the racial limitations of critical legal studies and exposing subjectivity through the production of narrative, advancing intersectionality as a legal and research paradigm, and expanding our understanding of harassment and discrimination law to account for the experiences of black women.