Refusing the God Trick: Engaging Black Women’s Knowledge

Abstract

Drawing on African diasporic, feminist, and decolonial streams of thought, this essay addresses gendered and racialized biases, gaps, and silences that depreciate Black women’s epistemological agency. The essay examines the significance of a proliferation of recent publications, including translations, that are bringing the intellectual contributions of Black women in the Americas to new audiences. This growing trend, which resonates with the objectives of #CiteBlackWomen, forms an integral part of a more comprehensive project seeking to reconstitute knowledge under conditions that break away from the prevailing cognitive empire. The Western cultural narratives, myths, and sleights of hand buttressing this regime inflict an epistemological violence that harms Black women.