Clenora Hudson-Weems

Clenora F. Hudson-Weems (born July 23, 1945) is an African-American author and academic who is currently a professor of English at the University of Missouri. She coined the term "Africana womanism" in the late 1980s, contending that women of African descent have always been Africana womanists by their very nature, dating back to Africana women in antiquity, even before the coinage of the word itself. Africana Womanism, a family-centered paradigm, observed this phenomenon, then proceeded in naming and defining a paradigm relative to who Africana women are and how they go about their daily lives in both the home place and the workplace.

Hudson-Weems wrote a research paper entitled "The Tripartite Plight of the Black Woman—Racism, Classism and Sexism—in Our Nig, Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple" during her first semester as a Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa in 1985. She set up a panel on the need for prioritizing race, class and gender for Black women and presented it at the 1986 National Council for Black Studies Annual conference, which was later published in the Journal of Black Studies in 1989.

Hudson-Weems has written many papers concerning the distinctions between Africana womanism, earlier called Black Womanism, Womanism and Black feminism. She believed that Black Feminism was lacking some crucial ideas in its concept, which motivated her to come up with Black/Africana Womanism. She was concerned about how the already existing concepts such as feminism, black feminism, womanism, did not include an authentic agenda for Africana women. Despite the fact that there has been immense progress for women under this ideology, some feminist scholars argue that it has effectively upheld white supremacist thought and boxed out women of color.

Womanism, on the other hand, is the notion that women should be valued not only as much as men, but as much as other women—regardless of race, class, and other elements that dictate social order. Its origins trace back to Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech "Ain't I A Woman?" where she calls into question this notion of womanhood that does not successfully encompass all the lives it seeks to control. As a black woman, and a slave, Truth was denied the courtesies, the respect, and the basic human rights given to her white female counterparts. Womanism focuses specifically on the ties linking women of color to one another, while also creating a very distinct dichotomy between the ways in which women of color might operate differently than their white feminist counterparts under the same oppressive forces. In terms of its distinction from womanism, Africana womanism is very ethnically specific. It facilitates the distinction of individual self-identification, dependent upon one's cultural background. The agency of Africana individuals is lacking, primarily because Western culture advocates Eurocentric beliefs rather than Afrocentric beliefs. To consider one's ethnic identity in the context of patriarchy is to encourage women of African descent to acknowledge their own unique, situational experiences. This offers women a mechanism of self-identification that can ease the burden of everyday life under socially, economically, religiously, and culturally limiting structures.