Vanessa Wills: Black Woman Marxists on Race, Gender, and Class

Are class-based analyses doomed to failure in adequately theorizing race- and gender-based oppressions? Vanessa Wills's (George Washington University) project is to draw attention to the ways that Black women writing and organizing in the Marxist tradition have tackled and centered this question. The focus here is on three of these remarkable women: Angela Davis, Claudia Jones, and Louise Thompson Patterson. Each of these women were (or, in the case of Davis, still are) deeply engaged in anti-racist and anti-sexist organizing, and saw these as commitments that were compatible with and mutually reinforcing of their adoption of a Marxist, class-based approach to theorizing oppression. What are the lessons that their scholarship and activism can teach us about the nature of exploitation, oppression, and intersectionality?

This event will take place in Edgecliffe G03.