Tommy J. Curry, University of Edinburgh, 'Feminism as Racist Backlash: Understanding How the Will to Dominate Black Americans Drove the Development of 19th and 20th Century Feminist Theory'.

The urge to decolonize philosophy and other Eurocentric disciplinary perspectives often fail, and rarely advance beyond the rhetorical invocation of more inclusive (liberal) politics. Despite the call to move away from Euro-centric and white based ontologies, philosophical anthropologies, and histories, philosophers and theorists rarely introduce new historiographies, archival materials, or conceptualizations of categories or movements. This paper argues for a historiographic intervention into 19th and 20th century feminism in the United States. Unlike previous research which has pointed out the individual racism of suffragettes, this paper argues for an understanding of the theories created and endorsed by feminists from 1860-1980 as the consequence of feminism’s dependence on ethnology and evolutionary theory in the 19th century and criminology in the 20th. By looking at the primary racial target of feminist thought and activism over the centuries, the Black male, I argue scholars can more accurately trace the theories feminists used to frame Black Americans struggle for civil rights.