Sociology and Criminology & Law

This talk is sponsored by the Philosophy Department, the Center for Humanities and the Public Sphere, African American Studies, the Department of History, and the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law.

Speaker: Dr. Vanessa Wills (The George Washington University)

Title: Claudia Jones, Black Woman Workers, and the Cause(s) of Oppression

Abstract: Claudia Jones was a Black, working-class woman of Trinidadian descent and an activist who participated in freedom struggles in the U.S. and the U.K. during the first half of the Twentieth Century. Among her achievements, she is notable for having developed the view that Black, working-class, women experience “triple oppression” on the basis of their race, gender, and economic class, and that therefore, in the U.S., the sociopolitical situation of Black, working-class, women plays a unique and central role in the struggle against all forms of oppression. Jones’s position has variously been described as a proto-intersectional or early Black Feminist view. However, Jones’s view seems to differ from these, in that while she brings focus to issues of racism and sexism in her analysis, she is nonetheless also quite willing to argue that ultimately, it is capitalism and class exploitation that operate as a fundamental cause of these forms of identity-based oppression. In this talk, I will discuss Jones’s legacy as well as recent scholarship on her work, and argue that while Jones’s ideas have significant overlap with influential present-day models for discussing racist and sexist oppression, her model of “triple oppression” is nonetheless inseparable from its theoretical foundations in a Marxist class analysis that centers the role of economic hierarchy and domination.