1940s: (Enslavement Rhetoric Against the Backdrop of War and Ethnic Cleansing: Against the Backdrop of War Ethnic Cleansing and International Systems of Unif…

1940s: (Enslavement Rhetoric Against the Backdrop of War and Ethnic Cleansing: Against the Backdrop of War Ethnic Cleansing and International Systems of Unification Such as the United Nations the Women Repeatedly Referencing Enslavement in Terms of the Historical and Present Vulnerability of Black Women to Sexual Violence Unequal Partnership and Their Unpaid and Underpaid Labor, Similar to Marxist Theorists of the Period the Women Connecting Their Unpaid Labor to Global Enslavement but Also Being Deeply Invested in Capitalist Participation and Articulating a Politics That Accounted for How Women Experienced Both Capitalism and Marxism as Black Women): Against the backdrop of war, ethnic cleansing, and international systems of unification like the United Nations, the women repeatedly referenced enslavement in terms of the historical and present vulnerability of Black women to sexual violence, unequal partnership, and their unpaid and underpaid labor. Similar to Marxist theorists of the period, the women connected their unpaid labor to global enslavement. Still, they were also deeply invested in capitalist participation and articulated a politics that accounted for how women experienced both capitalism and Marxism as Black women. They refused the binary that would force them to choose between class analysis and racial solidarity, between revolutionary critique and bourgeois aspiration, insisting instead on a politics capacious enough to hold the contradictions of Black women’s lives in a world that had been built on their labor.