Leith Mullings: Realizing the Full Potential of African American Women

In 1997 the incomparable Leith Mullings published On Our Own Terms, a collection of essays. Some of these essays were highly acclaimed articles that had been previously published elsewhere or first presented as an influential conference paper circa 1982 to 1996. When the essays were collected, revised, and polished as a body, the result was the pioneering, classic text in Black feminist anthropology, and at large, feminist anthropology. Almost twenty-five years later, On Our Own Terms still provides a template for understanding the critical importance of native anthropology/memoir, history, political economy, the politics of health and illness, and praxis in Black feminist anthropological discourses. Mullings’s opus directs our attention not only to her scholarship, but also to a way to find “a cure” for racism through social science endeavors, in the classroom and in social movements. Moreover, she notes that we (meaning progressive academics/Black feminist anthropologists) have the moral and theoretical responsibility to take action with the goal of being responsible to our community at home and throughout the African Diaspora (Mullings 1997, xix). On Our Own Terms shows how to do this, not with a set of policy recommendations or strategies for action, but with theoretical guidance so as to make it possible for the reader to move forward in their own deliberations. This essay focuses on the influential, groundbreaking, pioneering text On Our Own Terms by reviewing the particulars of the text and its overarching themes. This is followed by how the book’s preface and chapter 6, “Images, Ideology, and Women of Color,” were used in an undergraduate course at the University of Maryland, College Park, as part of the curriculum in Introduction to Black Women’s Studies. This course is one of the prerequisites for earning a Minor in Black Women’s Studies (BWMST), jointly offered by the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) department and the African American Studies Department (AASD). Leith Mullings’s scholarship was front and center of the Introduction to Black Women’s Studies (WMST 263) syllabi when I taught the course every other year from 2000 to 2014. When I was on leave, one of my advisees took over the class, often using versions of my syllabi as guides.