SOURCE: Perkins, Margo V. “Getting Basic: Bambara's Re-visioning of the Black Aesthetic.” In Race and Racism in Theory and Practice, edited by Berel Lang, pp. 153-63. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000.

In the following essay, Perkins discusses how the writings of Toni Cade Bambara address the exclusion of African American women both by Black men and white feminists.

Published in 1970, Toni Cade Bambara's The Black Woman continues to speak to many African-American women's experiences three decades later.¹ This edited volume of critical essays, poetry, and stories by black women writers and activists is one of the earliest feminist challenges to the overtly masculinist discourse of late 1960s-1970s black nationalist struggle. Many young women who first picked up the volume in the 1970s found the work affirming and empowering. Its popularity created new spaces for critical dialogue around issues important to black women that had been...