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I signed out of zoom, sat up straight, placed my elbows on the table, clasped my hands together, pulled them up to my mouth, closed my eyes, and sighed out loud from exhaustion. I’d been zooming back-to-back non-stop since 9:30am. It was now well past 5pm, and I’d yet to eat lunch or dinner. Emotionally and mentally drained and starved, I raced into the kitchen to make dunch, a combination of the two, then sat down in front of my computer and commenced to scoff down my meal as if it were my last, while scrolling mindlessly through Facebook in hopes of redirecting my energy for a moment – so that I might continue working. Why am I rushing? I paused and asked myself. Because 1) the work is never ending when you’re a Black woman, and 2) the kind of work we have to do is draining. At that very moment a meme flashed before me:
Let me clarify so I can make it make sense to the people in the back. For those who may not know, DEI stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Diversity training began in the workplace in the 1960s in response to the civil rights movement and affirmative action and equal employment laws. The idea was to decrease discrimination and increase belonging and sensitivity (while providing protections against civil rights complaints and lawsuits) in the workplace through hiring, awareness, training, and education. Today, diversity initiatives are mass-mediated alongside twin powers: equity and inclusion, producing a range of vision statements, strategic plans, task forces, resources, ambitions, affinity groups, job opportunities, et al. across public and private sectors, mandating against not only racism but also sexism, heterosexism, transphobia, ethnocentrism, ableism, religious bigotry, and more.
To be sure, thanks to the DEI trinity our places of work and business look more closely like the world we live in. In academia, this means more diverse faculty, staff, administrative pools, students, curriculum, departments, programs, research, promotions, tenure structures and rules, programming, organizations, speeches and lecture series, and dishes during seasonal celebrations and office potlucks. Space, regardless of what that space felt and feels like, was made for historically excluded groups. This matters.
Now, let me say this from the bottom of my Black feminist heart: the trio – diversity, equity, and inclusion aka DEI – is not “giving what it’s supposed to give.” (This is a Hip-Hop reference. If you don’t get it, it’s okay. Read on.) Representation is neither equity nor inclusion. As Audre Lorde reminds us, diversity without structural change is tokenism and tokenism is tolerance, the latter of which is “the grossest reformism.” In other words, diversity is gradual accommodation. To make it plain/er, representation without radical, and particularly Black feminist, political analyses, organizing, and practice bent towards justice is assimilation. And this, she posits, is the opposite of revolution.
And the latter, quite frankly, must be the goal of DEI in higher education. Because true equity notes both difference and how we are differently situated towards power in harmful structures of dominance. It maintains revolution as the goal because, as the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass reminds us, power concedes nothing without demand. That is, equity requires revolting against and upending the status quo. Inclusion follows the establishment of true equity and comes by way of a creative majority insisting on a culture where nobody is exploited, namely Black women.
By the way, the latter of which can also be predators. What happens to our understanding of DEI and the politics of redress when the foundational trope, white oppressor/Black oppressed, is destabilized to include Black women as keepers of the power structure? That’s an article for another day. The bottom line is this: you can’t be equitable or inclusive while ignoring exploitative praxis or the re-inscription of structural dominance anywhere. This is a blind spot for DEI that needs interrogating. Anywho, what DEI needs is a more prophetic imagination, not clout. This necessitates not fancy trigger words like sensitivity, belonging, value, grace, empathy, love, or generosity, but rather radical practices of participatory justice.
First of all, for those of us who experience the need for DEI or are DEI hires, trigger words like these are perplexingly predominantly ideological. They don’t always play out in our experiences, especially for Black women. Second, comfort words make institutions feel good. They aren’t the answer to structural problems. Third, too often it’s Black women who are expected to be sensitive or extend grace, empathy, love, generosity, et al. We aren’t typically on the receiving end. Fourth, and relatedly, these words function to silence complaints. Fifth, racial, gender, sexual, economic, and other forms of sensitivity too heavily depend on some sort of moral suasion for the powers that be, which, after 48 years on this earth as a cisgender heterosexual Black woman, I simply don’t have much patience for or belief in.
I was born and raised in the Black Church and am the daughter of a retired Black Baptist preacher and theologian. My early years were spent living in family housing on The Interdenominational Theological Centers’ (ITC) campus in Atlanta, Georgia. You can’t get more church-ier than being raised up on the campus of “the consortium of five predominantly African-American denominational Christian seminaries.” Thusly, I was baptized in theologies of grace, love, hope, and ultimate goodness before I could speak. However, Black feminism taught me to be suspicious of grace and love rhetoric in neocolonial environments, especially as a Black woman. More, experiences have taught me there are some things to be less hopeful about. Sensitivity for my Black female life is one.
Please note I write these words with Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal (and images of his smiling face in the backseat of a car driven by a Black driver) flashing before me on my computer and phone screens. The lesson taught over and over is that sensitivity is a privilege only a few get to experience. Black people in America are reminded daily there is no sensitivity for us beyond the transient. As Frank Wilderson writes in The Nation,
For one hot summer moment, the cries of our allies had been authorized by the demand that Black suffering embodies…That moment did not last…and the zeitgeist shifted from unfettered Black rage to sober tutorials on activist websites and affinity gatherings on how to massage a message that was already massaged, to win the hearts and minds of Middle Americans as they watched us being gunned down on Instagram and the news.
Michael Harriot writes in The Root,
When the country collectively witnessed the brutal May 25, 2020 death of George Floyd, white people were forever changed. Millions took to the streets, arm-in-arm with their fellow brethren, offering their support for justice and equality. Corporations changed their policies. Individuals joined the movement. To prove their commitment, companies pledged billions to the struggle for racial equity. This multiracial outpouring of sympathy and solidarity transformed the country.
However, Harriot continues, while corporations pledged to donate money to social justice organizations, a review of pledges compiled by Creative Investments Research revealed the following:
American corporations…pledged to spend $50bn on racial equity since Floyd’s murder…The funds were to be spread between donations to civil rights organisations, targeted investments in communities of colour and overhauls of their internal recruiting and training programmes. Yet only about $250m has actually been spent or committed to a specific initiative.
All that said, miss me with sensitivity goals and outcomes. Discrimination and disparity rages on. And this includes higher education. Nikole Hannah-Jones anyone?
Sixth, belonging and value cannot be manufactured. Especially not in contexts where DEI efforts are posed as the right/eous thing to do as opposed to the only thing to do, or worse, weaponized as institutional protections against civil rights complaints and lawsuits. Or more, in context where such efforts reproduce and maintain cultures where Black women function like work horses and learn to normalize self-negation and accept poor treatment out of fear of retaliation, never-enough-ness, imposter syndrome, exploitation, distance, silence, silencing, conflict, losing, dismissal, reduction, ignorance, misreading, victim-blaming, erasure, and more – all while being celebrated for filling diversity quotas.
Black women in academia carry a particular kind of burden. The university needs us for diversity, and we need to work. Yet, our collective labors, visible and invisible (including the emotional), and our relationships to power, hardly rise to the level of data. That is, while non-Black women get to just focus on their research, writing, and teaching, Black women spend our weeks being celebrated for diversity while fighting for equity and inclusion in real time. And we still must produce — while functioning as miracle workers and healers tasked with uplifting entire institutions that don’t love us. Regrettably, for those who don’t know any better this is an honor. But this is the difference between being happy to be at the table and demanding the right to shift the structuring of the table that was crooked from the start. Most of us understand that the continuous pressure to do work that no one else is expected to do is pathological, exploitative, and exhausting.
DEI is more than having a seat at the table. It’s more than hiring, promotion, a new department, or even really good pay. It’s revolutionary acts of participatory justice that attends to the oppressions laid bare and commits to continuous critical self-reflection at all levels (Toni Cade Bambara, 1980). It’s participatory in that it insists on accountability and transformation both vertically and horizontally. This is a form of recompense and how institutions might actually show value. If DEI cares anything about retention it should care about this. And truth be told, no one should be using Black women for diversity clout if their retention game ain’t strong and satisfaction categories on the DEI scorecard ain’t #goals.
This leads me to my final and seventh point. DEI efforts that center grace, empathy, love, and/or generosity over and against participatory justice while concomitantly ignoring the operation of power and power relations (in not only minoritized contexts where Black women are the minority but also in contexts where there are multiple members of historically marginalized groups, some of which hold power) are not only unsustainable and costly but abusive. No matter how well-intentioned, DEI commitments to grace, empathy, love, generosity, et al. that fail to a) foreground specifically Black feminist structural analyses of power and b) pay attention to how these levers are simultaneously used against Black women to muzzle them, particularly as they are the people typically asked to provide care and understanding, call to mind what Dietrich Bonhoeffer refers to as “cheap grace.” “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves…the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance…Communion without confession…”
In laypersons terms, it’s grace, empathy, love, and generosity without accountability, justice, and real structural change. In Black feminist terms, it’s symbolic, negligent, and death-dealing. But perhaps revolution and participatory justice, the latter of which requires accountability, are incommensurable and thusly beyond the scope of DEI. Though I have little left, I hope not. But if so, the prophetic tradition from which I engage the world and which gives me the fire that burns within to stay alive, thrive, and use my voice for the people, regardless, requires at minimum honesty about that.
Black feminists remind us that honest-talk aka telling it like it is aka truth telling is the first step towards building equitable communities. Black women can work with the truth. We’ve been creating survival mechanisms in contexts of ugly truths all our lives. So, if DEI is really just for clout and the mad dash for grace, empathy, love, and generosity rhetoric is really about weaponizing vulnerabilities then just say that. We [still] gon’ be alright.
Alls my life I has to fight…
Alls my life I
Hard times like, yah!
Bad trips like, yah!
Nazareth, I’m fucked up
Homie, you fucked up
But if God got us then we gon’ be alright— Kendrick Lamar
Tamura Lomax is the Foundational Associate Professor of African American and African Studies (AAAS) at Michigan State University. She received her Ph.D. in 2011 from Vanderbilt University in Religion, where she specialized in Black Religious History and Black Diaspora Studies. She also developed expertise in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Black British and U.S. Black Cultural Studies. In 2018, Dr. Lomax published Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture with Duke University Press. In addition, she organized and guest edited “Black Bodies in Ecstasy: Black Women, the Black Church, and the Politics of Pleasure,” a special issue published with Black Theology: An International Journal. In 2014, she published Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Cultural Productions with Palgrave Macmillan, a co-authored edited volume with Rhon S. Manigault-Bryant and Carol B. Duncan. And she is currently at work on a new book, Parenting Against the Patriarchy: Raising Non-Toxic Sons in White Supremacist America with Duke University Press. In 2011, Dr. Lomax co-founded The Feminist Wire (TFW). In addition to online publishing, TFW has a book series with the University of Arizona Press: The Feminist Wire Books: Connecting Feminisms, Race, and Social Justice.
By Annie Menzel
For white people working to align ourselves with justice, it makes sense to want to distance ourselves from Amy Cooper, the “Central Park Karen.” Amy Cooper deliberately lied to police, accusing Black birder Christian Cooper of threatening her life when Mr. Cooper asked her to respect the park’s dog-leashing rules and began to document her refusal. As Nylah Burton argues, it is important that progressive whites acknowledge our political kinship with Amy Cooper: that she is solidly liberal, not a Trump-supporting reactionary. But white parents—and white mothers in particular—must dive even deeper into this kin relation, and confront the lineages that we share with Cooper—and with BBQ Becky, Permit Patty, Pool Patrol Paula, and the countless other manifestations of the white feminine face of police terror.
Most white parents that I know are anguished and distressed at the pervasiveness of police and police-sanctioned murders of Black people. Just in recent weeks: Breonna Taylor. Tony McDade. Ahmaud Arbery. George Floyd. Rayshard Brooks. 18-year-old Tony Robinson, in my town of Madison, Wisconsin (occupied Ho-Chunk land), back in 2015, in the next neighborhood over from ours. Christian Cooper’s name was not added to this litany—but as Apryl Williams has pointed out, Amy Cooper’s call might well have resulted in his murder.
Growing numbers of white parents in my networks have also been participating in protests, donating to abolitionist groups, and following with amazement the way that organizations working for Black liberation—like Freedom Inc. and Urban Triage here in Madison—have made defunding and even dismantling the police real options.
How can we bring our children along, and support within them the capacity and desire for a world without police or prisons? The folks at Embrace Race (and many other organizations and individuals) have challenged us as white parents to talk openly with our kids about racism, the ongoing legacies of slavery, and the police murders of Black people. Powerful resources exist to get us started; recent events on this theme include this panel with Dr. Kira Banks of Raising Equity and Dr. Beverly Tatum, and this event featuring Ibram X. Kendi and Derecka Purnell.
Amy Coopers and Derek Chauvins don’t happen all at once or without discernible cause. There is much to say about directly murderous white masculinity and police violence. But as the white mother of a white daughter, I am homing in here on Amy Cooper’s deceitful phone call to the police, an everyday act of anti-Black racism remarkable only for being so explicit in its illustration of a long history of white women’s murderous bad faith.
In They Were Her Property, historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers writes that plantations were, in addition to bloody machines for capital, “a school,” where slaveowners’ white daughters daily absorbed from birth lessons of violability of Black life and their own entitlement to control Black people’s bodies. These lessons in dehumanization were necessary preparation for their own adult slaveownership. After emancipation, the lessons of anti-Blackness persisted through multifarious forms of Black criminalization and lynch law; white girls across class lines were socialized into the knowledge that their own transgressions could be disappeared by what anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells called “the threadbare lie” of Black men’s sexual threat. This lie, in its threadbareness and horrific efficacy, has remained on the white supremacy syllabus ever since. 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered after Carolyn Bryant Donham lied—an atrocity that, as Michael Harriot notes, echoes in Amy Cooper’s call. Angela Davis’ classic analysis of the “myth of the Black rapist” remains hideously current. Our contemporary society, still so profoundly structured by slavery’s ongoing legacies, patriarchy, and racial capitalism, continues to educate white girls into this lie, body and soul.
While not always explicitly sexual, the lie of Black threat is bound to the particular brew of domination and subjugation that underpins normative white femininity: a quick visual survey of the BBQ Beckys, Newport Nancys, and Amy Coopers suggests that while they span the class spectrum from working-class to elite (though skewing toward privilege), they are all conventionally feminine-presenting, apparently typically-abled, cisgender women. And, as in the era that Jones-Rogers charts, white women’s exercise of deadly force continues to be about property and control of Black people’s bodies—whether literally gatekeeping private residences, or a proprietary relation to public spaces of parks and pools.
This calls for confrontations with what feminist philosopher Alexis Shotwell calls white colonizers’ “bad kin.” Shotwell figures as bad kin among others, such as the culturally appropriative white friend and the paradigmatic racist uncle (whom she urges us to “call in” rather than disavowing) as well as explicitly white supremacist groups (whom she encourages white people to “claim back” by taking the frontline of direct opposition). Shotwell suggests that such confrontations are a necessary component of white people’s joining in struggles for decolonization, anti-racism, and collective liberation.
Just as crucial are confrontations with that bad kin within ourselves and our ancestral lines, which we otherwise continue to pass down regardless of good intentions. Visionary Zen priest, teacher, and author Reverend angel Kyodo williams argues that, in order to inhabit radical possibilities of future liberation and life, whites must reckon with the violent pasts and ancestors that live within the self. As Rev. angel said at a recent panel: “in that practice of stillness…you can differentiate what is endemic to you and what you have inherited…history becomes that reference point…I thought that was me and it turns out that that has happened again and again and again…there was Amy Cooper that decade, that decade, and that decade…these are not just individual choices but…it takes individual responsibility and accountability to shift that pattern…but you have to be invested, you have to want to pull that illness out of your body like it’s killing you, because it is.”
I just learned a few months back, as my mom went through old family papers, that my great-great grandmother, Carrie Alice Miller Peairs, photographed here with her daughters, was a teacher at a series of Bureau of Indian Affairs schools on Puyallup, Yakama, and Hopi reservations. I rage and mourn for those children, their kin and communities. I wonder how I might even begin to make reparation for my ancestors’ harms. And I also wonder what Carrie had to lay waste to, to cauterize within herself, in order to participate in these atrocities, as well as what she herself witnessed or bore, how she came to embody her own inheritance of white settler violence. I am haunted by the eyes of her daughters, my great-grandmother Gladys and her sister Edna. What did they witness? How did they learn not to see the blood that suffused their womanhood, their place in the family and nation? Did they also glimpse, and turn away from, other ways of being and relating among the peoples that their mother was charged to “civilize?”
What do I carry of those colonial horrors? How are they tied to anti-Blackness? And to cycles of harm borne as well as inflicted by these white settler bloodlines, in which addiction and abuse have been endemic? During my tween and teen years in segregated College Station, Texas, I never learned about the Tonkawa people whose land we occupied; I never learned about the nine lynchings that took place in Brazos County. In this town permeated with rape culture, I also never learned to value my own body, to say no, about consent or pleasure, or to breathe into my own inherent dignity. This is not in any way to minimize the far greater vulnerability of Black and Indigenous women and girls, and queer and trans folks to all forms of violence, including sexual violence. Yet, I feel the deep links between my socialization and experiences—from which the police never protected me—and the unbidden surge of my own inner Karen (or Carrie) when I feel thwarted in daily life, powerlessness and rage turned to an impulse to debase and punish others: customer service representatives, political antagonists, friends, family members, my own daughter.
Abolitionist and transformative justice visionaries like Mariame Kaba and Mia Mingus offer a way of thinking about cycles of violence that turns away from punishment and looks to transform the conditions from which they arise. As Kaba, drawing on Danielle Sered, says, “no one enters violence for the first time by committing it. Meaning that something happened to you that led to that other form of violence of you either lashing out, using violence, because that’s how you learned how to be whatever.” Along with making clear the absolute necessity of supporting local and national organizing against police and prisons, this framework urges me to encounter my ancestors, and the ways they live inside me still, with an accountability framework that demands reparation for harm—yet refuses to reject harmers as monsters, as not-me. Mingus writes, “This does not excuse people’s harmful behavior or mean that a person who has caused harm or been violent doesn’t need to be accountable for their actions, but it does mean that we need to understand the context in which harm and violence happen.”
Guided by these principles, our family and close community strive to cultivate in my daughter an inner and outer ecology inhospitable to Karen (and the larval forms of Kylie and Becky): a sense of inherent value in self and other humans and the more-than-human world; an understanding of consent and pleasure in age-appropriate ways; deep community that involves a variety of trusted adults; a preschool and kindergarten that refuses the criminalization of Black children, Latinx children, and other children of color; frank discussions about ongoing histories of racism and colonization and the inherent violence of police. It is also crucial to accompany her through confrontations with all of our bad kin, in Shotwell’s sense, from Carrie Peairs to Amy Cooper. It is utterly unjust that the video of the latter is, for my daughter and me, an opportunity to attempt these confrontations in bodily safety, while Black folks continue to face the mortal threat Cooper invokes. This unjust insulation charges us to watch and reflect on it in the service of both inward and outward action. Dr. Jennifer Harvey offers a thoughtful reflection on talking about the video with her white 9- and 11-year-olds, and speculates about how it might go with a younger child. I offer our experience as an imperfect example of how it actually went with a 5-year-old white girl.
Me: I want to talk about something that happened a couple of days ago, when a white woman lied and tried to hurt a Black man.
She: (not super interested) Ok.
Me: I am going to show you a video of it.
She: (now extremely interested, because a screen is involved) OK!
Me: OK. A white woman named Amy was walking her cute dog in the woods that were part of a special part of a park where lots of birds live. There were signs saying that dogs had to be on a leash. Why do you think that might be a good rule for these woods?
She: Dogs might chase the birds.
Me: Yes! But guess what, Amy took her dog off the leash. A Black man, Christian, was there to watch the birds, and he saw Amy’s dog. He said something like “ma’am, please put your dog back on its leash.” But she didn’t want to put the dog on its leash. Let’s watch the video to see what she did.
(We play the video through the part where she calls the police and reports an “African American man threatening [her]”)
Me: Is she telling the truth? Is Christian threatening her life?
She: No. She is hurting her dog!
Me: She is lying and she is also hurting her dog. She isn’t in control of herself, is she?
We have talked about how the police were invented a long time ago by white people to control Black people who they had kidnapped and forced to work as slaves, and protect rich white people’s stolen land and their stuff. And how police still kill Black people and Indigenous people and protect white people’s stuff. And they don’t make white people safe either. Remember how we talked about how police just killed a Black man named George Floyd in Minneapolis, where your friend A. lives. Black leaders here and all over are trying to make it so that there aren’t police anymore, and we want that too–that’s why we are going to protests right now.
From old times until now, white women sometimes lie and say that a Black person threatened them when they do something wrong or don’t want to follow the rules, because usually the police and other white people will believe them and they won’t get in trouble. That’s what Amy did. And she knew that if the police came, they might hurt or even kill Christian. But she did it anyway.
What do you think Amy could have done instead?
She: She could have said “OK, I’ll put my dog on his leash and take him to a dog park.”
Me: That could have been a good response. How do you think Christian might have felt when Amy called the police?
She: He might have been scared.
Me: Let’s watch Christian talking about what happened.
We watch this short video of Christian Cooper saying that he refused “to participate in [his] own dehumanization.” She didn’t offer any comments, but seemed to absorb the conversation.
As I watch the videos by myself, again, there are other questions I wish I’d asked, other ways that I might have better gone about it. In particular, I’d like to ask, what do you notice about Amy’s voice? The register changes from entitled threat to panicked fear as she makes the call—mock-fear, surely, but also reflecting the embodied, physiological experience of going, in Mr. Cooper’s words, to “a very dark place,” channeling centuries of a white femininity—as Sarah Bellamy powerfully observes—predicated on anti-Black violence.
At the same time, I wish that I had left more space open for my daughter’s own reflections. When our dialogue came up in conversation with other adults a week or so later, she denied any memory of the video. So, we watched it again, with fewer but similar prompts, and similar observations emerged. Was it in part because of my own intensity, my own white womanly desires for goodness, that the video actually didn’t stick, or that she wanted to distance herself from the experience? Was it discomfort speaking with adults that she didn’t know well? I wonder if, had I left her more space, she would have had more room to claim the discussion as her own. There was no doubt both more and less that I could have said.
In our varying capacities to be out in the streets, it is key that we bring our kids along into the emergence of new and more liberatory ways of being. This could mean being present with them at protests and celebrations, including them in making the signs, sharing with them videos of our friends and comrades and movement leaders, and including them early and often in conversations about alternatives to calling the police. Recently, organizers from Madison’s Freedom Inc and Urban Triage led an hours-long shutdown of a major intersection. Part of the action was their choreographing of white protestors to form a perimeter around Black protestors and protestors of color, as an embodied practice of what our relationship to the police should be: protecting our Black comrades and comrades of color from them, not calling them for a shallow security that binds us to domination. Though my daughter wasn’t there that day, some other dear kids in our life were, and I was able to share my experience with her later. But if we don’t also explicitly face the poison in our cultural and family lineages, in tandem with acts of public solidarity, we might nevertheless find ourselves raising tomorrow’s Amy Coopers. And there is no reason to trust that the police will not shoot next time a white woman cries wolf.
What would accountability look like for Amy Cooper? I am not sure. It may be that losing her job and her dog could be part of a just response. But these consequences alone, accompanied as they were with self-righteous disavowals from her employer and other white people, will transform nothing. And proposed new laws categorizing Amy Cooper-type calls as hate crimes, even as they seem to promise a poetic reversal of racialized criminality and may make some white women think twice, will also give the police more power. The danger is, as Dean Spade has argued about anti-LGBTQ hate crimes, that they will inevitably turn this power against communities of color, queer and trans people, poor people, and people with disabilities. And it will do nothing to dissolve white femininity’s reflexive anti-Black “dark place.” Police power helps to maintain the toxic atmosphere of anti-Blackness that impacts Black women’s birth outcomes and obstructs reproductive justice. And police power is also instrumental in maintaining the ongoing system of colonial violence that my ancestors directly contributed to, which exposes 4 in 5 Indigenous women to violence and to murder rates over 10 times the national average. Rather than turning to hate crime laws, let us do away with the police altogether instead.
It is incredible the way that youth and veteran Black organizers are together realizing historic moves toward precisely this dismantling of our national police state. Let those of us who are white parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins keep actively supporting these transformations with our bodies and resources. As part of this work, and in honor of our children’s potential for a humanity beyond white supremacist hierarchies, let us free ourselves from the inherited forms of white femininity—and masculinity—that keep us bound to the police, and to the racial capitalist, anti-Black, colonial, patriarchal order that they serve and protect.
With gratitude to Lisa Beard, Gail Konop, and Monica Casper for feedback on earlier versions, and to Rev. angel Kyodo williams for use of the quote.
Annie Menzel is a political theorist and former midwife whose work focuses on understanding how white supremacy, colonization, and gender-based oppression shape human reproductive life, health, and care—as well as theorizations and praxes of reproductive justice and freedom. She is completing revisions on her first book, The Political Life of Black Infant Mortality, under contract with the University of California Press, and is also at work on a second book project, Birthing Paradox: Race, Colonization, and Radicalism in US Midwifery, which seeks to understand the contradictory politics and practices of the homebirth midwifery movement since 1970. She has work published or forthcoming in the Du Bois Review, Contemporary Political Theory, Political Research Quarterly, Political Theory, Signs, and The Boston Review.
We all have watched When They See Us. It has galvanized us to speak/say/commit ourselves to witnessing/damning white supremacy, openly and aggressively. Ava DuVernay explodes the horrors of white supremacy in white people’s faces, if we will look. We feel the need to respond to her generosity.
In response, we—white women activists, writers, and scholars—say:
We want white supremacy to end, no matter what it means for us or other white people. We know it will be better than the white privilege and punishing system of white supremacy that keep white womanhood in place as a site for disciplining and erasing people of color.
Rape is the often-charged crime that creates the furious punishment of people of color, most especially Black men. The rape of Black enslaved women was the law of the land during chattel slavery. Black women could not be officially raped because they had no legal standing in the law. Only the rape of white women was viewed as criminal; white rapists were protected and the usual foil was Black men, and in this case, Black boys.
It is too damning to us that two white women prosecutors were primarily responsible for the lies and fabrications that condemned five Black boys and their families to hell. It is time – well past time – that white women say we completely condemn the legal carceral system for its racist and misogynist practices.
When They See Us—reminds us of James Baldwin. In order to really see these boys and their families, white people have to see us as participatory in racism. So, to see their innocence, “we” must see our own part, our complicity, our responsibility in the newest forms of slavery, no longer chattel, but carceral. We wonder if we are making this too much about ourselves, and white people—but we are pretty sure that in order to really see and love black people, we must absorb the atrocities and promise to change them.
When They See Us makes white people see themselves when white privilege always gives us the option of not seeing, avoiding, silencing, pretending, doing nothing. People of color always are in the presence of white privilege—they know how it feels, and smells, and sounds. They do not have the choice that whites have—to ignore or deny white supremacy. Their lives depend on knowing and navigating whiteness.
We despise what the district attorney Linda Fairstein and prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer, along with the police, did in this case. They led with their prejudices and anger, and Fairstein did so as head of the Manhattan District Attorney’s sex crimes unit. We are feminists and abhor the rape of any woman, let alone the viciousness of this one. But we condemn the astounding/damning disregard for evidence and proof and the ruined lives of the five accused. She/they could not see their racism so she could not see them. She knew time lines were askew, she/they knew there was no DNA evidence, she knew there were multiple inconsistencies. And she did not care.
We are hoping for a public shaming of every racist act documented in this story. Although Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Kevin Richardson were exonerated of the crime—the real rapist confessed in 2002—there has been no apology for the terrible wrongs done. Trump held firm when recently asked about his initial inflammatory racist remarks and actions regarding the guilt of these boys, now men. He put a bounty on their heads. There still needs to be a public acknowledgement of this unconscionable injustice, and proposed remedies to redress the suffering.
Already in these first weeks following the airing of When They See Us, Fairstein has been asked to and has resigned her seat on Vassar’s board of Trustees. Fairstein’s publisher has cut ties with her. A petition was circulated calling for the firing of Lederer at Columbia Law School, and she has also resigned. But we caution singularizing the problem to any two individuals. Rather, this entire case should be used to shed light on the corruption and terrorism of the carceral system at its structural roots. Remedies, more than punishments, are needed for all the Eric Garners and Kalief Browders, Sandra Blands and Cyntoia Browns.
Justice is still needed for those falsely accused and behind bars.
Our visor is individual and structural, personal and political. Our debt is to Black women and women of color who fight hard against injustice: the Black women who did not vote for Trump; who bring us Stacey Abrams and Senator Barbara Lee; the Black women and women of color who work hard to repair racist injustices, and struggle for us all, daily.
DuVernay has succeeded: “we” are the they and we see you and offer a new promise: to interrupt, undermine, uncover, dismember the injustice that makes us complicit and keeps white supremacy in place.
We want to be more than allies in this struggle. We will strive to become trusted comrades. We commit to being sisters under the skin. We will not stand idly by.
We commit to taking action against the racist injustice in the criminal system. Some of these efforts include providing support for the many organizations already doing this work, like WINNING JUSTICE through Color of Change, and the Nia Project in Atlanta. We will read, and continue to learn everything we can from Black women who have been in this struggle for decades: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, Andrea Ritchie, and Mariame Kaba, to name a few. And in the spirit of reparations, we have made donations and will continue to give to Survived and Punished, #Free Black Mamas, BYP100, The Innocence Project, the Korey Wise Innocence Project, Equal Justice Initiative, and other organizations engaged in this work.
Sign this letter if you will and/or please circulate widely throughout your networks. Commit to making all white people uncomfortable with white supremacy while doing so—the sharing of this letter is meant to be a small step in interrupting the silences of white supremacy. This is a dispersed action, with moments of camaraderie as you read and commit.
Let us see what we can do, together.
Zillah Eisenstein
Monica J. Casper
Laura Flanders
Mab Segrest
Donna Haraway
Rosalind Petchesky
Stephanie Gilmore
Miriam Brody
Heather Turcotte
Sarah Stumbar
Joan Wolf
Susan Buck-Morss
Linda Alcoff
Paula Ioanide
Lisa Bowden
Leah Kramnick
Annie Menzel
Barbara Mink
Sonya Lea
Tamsen Bassford
Deborah Kessler
Heather Laine Talley
Linda Edwards
Rebecca Sullivan
Kit-Bacon Gressitt
Sara Marchant
Jennifer Roth-Gordon
Catherine A. Tietjen
Wanda Kolomyjec
Jennifer Miller
Beth Harris
Katie Howard
Sareanda
Martha Lasley
Molly Casteel
Rev. Dr. Joelle Colville-Hanson
Karen Friedeborn
Judith Ezekiel
Rev. Carol Tompkins
Tara Stetler
Anne M. Burns
Becky Berdahl
Antoinette House
Karen Coad
Deborah Dimmett
Diana Clegg
Eve Rifkin
Kayleigh Kresse
Stephanie Serino
Megan Carney
Diane Kaufmann
Zulma Iguina
Eleanor Dozier
Terry O’Neill
MaryEllen O’Connell
Anna M. Stalter
Barbara A. Barnes
Barbara Regenspan
Barbara Keshishoglou
Sian Cowman
Diane Carruthers
Becky Armitage
Joanna Brooks
Kellie Lamoreau
Rachel Hamrick
Roberta Wallitt
Jane Caputi
Kim Knight
Jere Alexander
Erika Raskin
Miriam Kurland
Lyndi Hewitt
M. Shadee Malaklou
Kali Tal
Dr. Susan Bond
Maureen “Mac” McCloskey
Rev. Kim Triplett
Rev. Anne Dunlap
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The Lemonade Reader, edited by Kinitra D. Brooks and Kameelah L. Martin, is a critical study on not only Black women, Black feminism, and Black popular culture, but what many deem as “Beyoncé Studies.” Why Beyoncé, you ask? Well, some might say because she’s iconic. Others might suggest because her business acumen runs circles around America’s top MBA programs. I say because she is a cultural phenomenon and because phenomena rooted in human experience, particularly that which moves us, must be studied — critically.
Tamura: Let’s cut to the chase: what makes an icon, and is Beyoncé one or nah?
Kinitra: We had this conversation on my Facebook wall a few days ago. I could see both sides. I didn’t necessarily take what Dionne Warwick said as shade because Beyoncé has longevity, but not the longevity of a Warwick, Franklin, and/or Ross even as she was well on her way to becoming that sort of icon. And then Kameelah read me for filth on my own damn page!
Kameelah: I don’t know what necessarily defines an icon, but there is no doubt about Beyoncé’s influence on the culture, her influence in the music industry, fashion, all sorts of things. I mean, what else do you need from an icon?
Kinitra: And Dr. Birgitta Johnson, one of the contributors to the volume, followed up with receipt upon receipt of not only Beyoncé’s influence on the culture, but also her business acumen in owning all of her own music publishing and production through what would eventually become Parkwood studios.
Tamura: So, this is interesting. Warwick acknowledges and clearly admires Beyoncé’s influence and business sense. She praised her growth as an artist and her control of her career and image. In that sense, Beyoncé is truly in a lane of her own. While I’m not ready to put a pin in what makes an icon or not, I think Warwick names something that is important to engage and that is, one, sustainability, and two, the timeless nature of universal messaging around themes such as love, joy, hope, etc. I think Beyoncé does this but in a way that’s different from previous generations. Would you agree or disagree? Also, does messaging even matter? Might her particular impact be enough? Who’s to say she hasn’t already made many “classics?” Time will tell, I guess. What say you?
Kameelah: I gave this idea of Beyoncé being timeless serious thought some years ago—around the time of the B’day album—when I was still deciding how far this thing with me and Bey was going to go. I remember thinking that her early ballads strived toward universal messaging. “Dangerously in Love” stood out as trying to hit that mark. I asked myself, in 30 years will folks be checking for the ballads as the go-to Beyoncé joint? I saw the effort to make that song (in performances especially) timeless, like many a Whitney Houston song. It didn’t work for me. The song was dope and all, and her live performances were epic in the way that she demonstrated how much she studied classic performers, but I didn’t see her as an artist that was timeless. Not then—it was like she was trying too hard. While hella folks were diggin’ it, I don’t think her particular positionality (Black, female, southern—to start with) and the way she played it imbued a universal, timeless message.
And that’s not a bad thing. I rather enjoyed the Black girl sass in her vocal intonations, her signifyin’ ass lyrics, and code-switching. There is value in speaking to a particular audience—I felt very much a target of her messaging as a Black, southern woman. I could appreciate it. In her later music, when she frees herself from the respectability politics and yoke of her father’s management, she wrestles with her identity as an artist; and with Lemonade, I think she totally divests herself from the packaged, manicured, Whitney Houston-esque visage of herself. It is in that visual album that I think her messaging finally becomes honest and most impactful. It certainly conveyed a universal, timeless message for many Black women—and perhaps for other groups and other women as well. Maybe that will be her classic work. I dare say it already is!
Kinitra: I do think she has reached a level of timelessness—simply because she now spans multiple generations of folks. She is timeless in having decades of consistent hits. She has hits amidst generations before and after us.
I also think it is necessary to put forth that though Lemonade presents a less than perfected visage of her—it is still quite packaged. She only lets us in so far. I have seen this presented as something negative and I would push back against this reading. She has heavy boundaries between her personal and professional life, her internal self, and the consummate professional persona we all know so well. Instead of reading this as fake, why don’t we read this as some things just aren’t our business and any entrance into her family and marriage will be heavily orchestrated? And if we look at the personal and professional lives of some of her contemporaries—Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Mariah Carey—she has survived and thrived wonderfully. This isn’t shade at any of those performers, this is acknowledgment of the soul-crushing ruthlessness of the entertainment business.
Finally, Lemonade is definitely messaging that is so complex, we don’t always notice it. We have to look back at that elevator incident. It was an unorchestrated view of her family dynamics at one of its most difficult moments. We saw Solange fiercely fight (what many assume) for her against Jay-Z amid all the nasty rumors and innuendo of their marriage. There were harsh jokes about Beyoncé hiding in the corner and not doing anything. I believe she used Lemonade to rise up and push back against this false reading of her supposed weakness. Lemonade shows her as vulnerable but also strong and resolute in discovering who she is as a woman, wife, mother, and mogul—it is the perfect messaging.
Tamura: I think you both just brought it full circle for me. Love, respect, and honor to Ms. Warwick, but folks become iconic because they bring flavor, sass, expertise, vision, and creativity we’ve yet to see. To be sure, Beyoncé is both a remix of the ancestors and the embodiment of their wildest dreams. But she is also something yet to be defined.
I think the popular discourse around iconography raises questions of inspiration, on one hand, and foundational influence, on the other. The question, then, for me at least, is will her work and/or business model inspire and become foundational in some way to those to come? Is it original enough for this sort of influence? I think so. But we’ll have to see.
Another issue I see happening here is the age-old fight between high and low culture, with high culture always already standing in for what is deemed “classic.” This seems to be the underlying argument in Warwick’s statement. As Kameelah said earlier, Beyoncé signifies a certain kind of – respecta-ratchet (my words, not Kameelah’s) – southern Black woman-ness that works for so many of us. She can do “Dangerously in Love” if need be, but she can also get down and dirty and cuss us out if she needs to do that. All of this in mind, we really need to rethink the whole “classics” thing. But let’s play along for a minute. Let’s stretch the limits of “classics” to include the down and dirty. Any “classics” on Lemonade? And not just in terms of music. What about Black feminist “classics”? Might feminists, and particularly Black feminists, see Lemonade as a fruitful text?
Kameelah: I certainly stand by my position that Lemonade is in a class of its own and may just be an instant classic. I think its impact has been that profound. And don’t get me started on classic moments in the visual album—I might not be able to contain myself! There are endless one-liners and visual cues that will forever be sanctified in the church of respecta-ratchet. When she tosses her wedding ring and admonishes, “Try this shit again and you gone lose your wife.” Baaaabayyy! Or when Beyoncé queries, “What will you say at my funeral, now that you have killed me?” The songs “Sorry” and “Freedom” also come to mind as possible contenders for the classic title. The poetry of Warsan Shire, particularly Warsan versus Melancholy, now takes on classic status. If one really evaluates Shire’s work, it becomes evident that her digital poetry album is the structural inspiration for the visual album. Shire moves through “the seven stages of being lonely” in a way that clearly influenced the arc of grief and healing that is Lemonade. Warsan Shire is a poet who stood in her own glory prior to Lemonade, for certain. But inspiring Bey’s creativity and also adapting her poetry for Lemonade places Shire’s work on a different pedestal; not because of Beyoncé per se, but because Warsan versus Melancholy now stands as the ur-text for this and perhaps other projects to follow.
Kinitra: There are definitely classic songs and moments from Lemonade—such as when she pushes through those double doors and we first see her in that yellow Cavalli dress or when she throws her ring at the camera….at the camera! I would agree with Kameelah in terms of “Sorry” and “Freedom,” but I would also include “Formation,” “Daddy’s Lessons,” and “Hold Up.”
Lemonade is a hearkening back to the idea of the classic album from the second half of the twentieth century, in which each cut is solid and strong and integral to the journey of the album. Lemonade takes us on a journey, and to remove any portion would take away the classic nature as well as the strengths of the piece. It’s meant to be listened to as a whole.
I would also expand the idea of the impact Beyoncé made with this album we are discussing in terms of what is considered classic by focusing our attention on her CMT performance with the Dixie Chicks. So much about that performance was creating a classic moment by remixing what is thought of as classic—that white lace dress with the shoulders and length reminiscent of Loretta Lynn, but with a daring sheerness that challenged the conservative nature of country music. Her bringing brass band sounds to country music to highlight the African contributions to the creation of so much of America’s sound—including country music. Expanding the idea of what is considered “country” and what isn’t and the erasure of Blackness in Texas, as each woman initiated the song by saying Texas in their own unique way. And giving us long-time Black fans of country music a moment in the sun that didn’t involve Darius Rucker (from Hootie and the Blowfish) – I love country because my grandfather loved country.
Kameelah: In terms of Black Feminism, it goes without saying that Lemonade is valuable to the body of Black feminist texts. It becomes part of a long genealogy of Black women thinkers, creators, movers, and shakers who have been doing the work of Black feminism for generations. Beyoncé shows us that she is in the know by paying homage to Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), to the Black Lives Matter Movement, to traditions and matriarchs of Black cultural institutions that have sustained the community such as the Mardi Gras Indians and restauranteur Leah Chase. And I’d be remiss if I did not point out how Beyoncé is invoking one of the oldest Black female intellectual traditions that exists—conjuring, spirit work, hoodoo, and such. What Kinitra and I are calling Conjure Feminism. It moves all throughout the text and serves as a type of anchor for Black women as they move through an anti-black, anti-feminine world. There is much scholarship that establishes conjuring as a Black feminine practice and much more that is to come. Black women have long used spirit work to negotiate their existence. Lemonade is an intersectional text that is plenty useful as Black feminists twist and contort their priorities to meet the 21st-century reality. To ignore a text that “cause all this conversation” is negligible. Even if you aren’t a die-hard, card-carrying member of the Beyhive, Lemonade is an important text that grapples with Black feminist ideologies, identity politics, trauma, and healing in ways we cannot afford to ignore.
Kinitra: Agreed. We must acknowledge Conjure and Rootwork as Intellectual histories of Black women that are specifically rooted in the South and the Caribbean. We are highlighting these women as philosophers with the powers to create and shift reality in ways that center what Kameelah defined as spirit work in her first book, Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo (2012). And I would like to take a moment to highlight the work we are doing and will continue to do on Conjure Feminism as well as invite others to participate.
We currently have a Call for Proposals for our special issue of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy on Conjure Feminism: Tracing the Genealogy of a Black Woman’s Intellectual Tradition that we are co-editing with Dr. LaKisha Simmons. And I got to spend this past year as a Hutchins fellow at Harvard University really beginning to outline and articulate my family’s own place in the traditions of conjure in my talk, “The Conjure Woman’s Garden” and essay, “Myrtle’s Medicines.” We are actively using Lemonade to have multiple scholarly conversations on multiple levels in ways that furthers the research we were already doing.
Tamura: Wow! You’ve done amazing work here. It’s both exciting and inspiring. Let’s say Beyoncé and her team get ahold of The Lemonade Reader. What would be the most important take away? And more, let’s say contemporary Black feminists sent her a “love package,” centering the Reader. What other texts might you include in the collection? Clearly, your text is in conversation with so many, dare I say “classics.” Off the top of my head, Chireau’s Black Magic (2006) immediately comes to mind. But if you were gifting her and her crew with six books, centering the Reader, what would you choose? And finally, any critiques? Lord knows, the Beyhive won’t appreciate this question. But, as a trained cultural critic who reads popular culture for the good and bad, I have to ask. Namely, what are we, as Black feminists, to do with her capitalism?
Kinitra: Let’s start at the end and go from there. I do think we should continue to have a conversation about Beyoncé and capitalism. But I agree with our contributor, Tami Winfrey Harris, who states in her interlude, “Formation and the Black Ass Truth about Beyoncé and Capitalism,” in that I itch at centering our critiques on Black women who benefit from capitalism. What are the politics of so many choosing to start their critiques with her and other Black women there? I’m torn because I do believe some of this is a backlash against Black women (finally?) capitalizing on their own bodies and talents when the entire American monetary system is grounded on the exploitation of our bodies as capital. This does not excuse Beyoncé—folks, for example, have righteously brought up the issues of the sweatshops that make her clothes. How does it complicate the capitalism issue when brown, often South Asian women are being financially exploited in her name? Simultaneously, I have seen non-Black women (feminists especially) use this as a way to push back at Beyoncé in ways that I am sure are steeped in misogynoir. I believe both of those things can be held in tension—a term I totally stole from your frequent use of it.
Kameelah: The issue of capitalism is a nonstarter for me as it concerns Beyoncé. It’s just not the hill I’m going to die on. I recognize that wealth comes with a great deal of responsibility and it often affords a great deal of creativity and the ability to act on that creativity in ways that beget more dollar, dollar bills, ya’ll. I’m not mad at Bey for any of it. And just like with her music, I imagine her business portfolio and capital investments have evolved over the decades. I’d be more interested to know how she has evolved because of these critiques. And equally important to this discussion is her philanthropy. She tossed a good bit of money specifically at HBCUs recently and provided scholarships for Black women. Can we also talk about the significance of that? She is not without fault and there are folks ready to fall off the cliff just to indict her as part of the capitalist patriarchal machine. I’m just not one of them.
Kinitra: I don’t see capitalism as the most pointed critique of Lemonade. For me, it is the lack of body diversity. Our contributor and your former student, Ashleigh Shackleford, discusses this in her interlude, “Bittersweet Like Me: When the Lemonade Ain’t Made For Fat Black Femmes and Women.” I remain flabbergasted as to how Beyoncé could make a film celebrating Black Southern women and no one is above a size four, except for the elders in the later interludes. What does it say that only older Black women could be considered acceptably fat? Even the ancestors that are studded throughout the film wearing white, women who lived during earlier times, were tiny and petite. I simply think it was a huge oversight. I’m a Southern Black woman. We are SOLID, even those of us who aren’t necessarily fat-bodied. And we were erased. I love Lemonade, but I found the willful exclusion of us…hurtful. And I believe Ms. Shackleford did as well.
Kameelah: I struggled with the use of Warsan Shire’s poetry. Even though it was adapted by Shire for the visual album, I still found it a bit troubling that Beyoncé took excerpts from poems and really reshaped the work of another artist to suit her own. I was quite familiar with Shire’s work and I remember cringing during the first viewing when I realized stanzas from different poems had been woven together to make Lemonade more cohesive. I’m still unsettled about it, actually. While Shire has an entirely new fan base, as a literary scholar I have to ask, what has Beyoncé’s use of the poetry done to its authenticity? How do we account for the removal of references to Islamic practice and faith in the original poems, for instance? Shauna Morgan delves into this question in her interlude, which I thought was such a necessary piece to include in the Reader. Many of the think pieces acknowledged Shire’s poetry and adaptation, but very few critiques have grappled with the issue of the poetry and the poet has remained pretty silent about it all.
I think another valid critique is that same-sex loving folk and queer Black men were also noticeably absent from the visual album.
Kinitra: I believe the most important takeaway is that you have to do the internal work to grow into your happiness. And it takes work, especially in a world that actively hates Black women and girls. And that Southern Black women have long been onto something in articulating and laying the pathway for their Black girl descendants to make such a journey of self-healing and self-discovery. Beyoncé has simply excelled at coalescing all of these insights into a 55-minute avante garde film/visual album.
Kameelah: I’m going to approach this from another angle. What I want Beyoncé and ‘nem to get from The Lemonade Reader is that something incredibly powerful transpired between Beyoncé and other Black women. My greatest curiosity is to hear Beyoncé articulate what it meant to witness the overwhelming response of Black women to Lemonade. Not everyone who contributed to the Reader is Black and female, nor is half the Beyhive, but I’m taking a point of privilege here because I recognized a dialogue happening between the messaging and imagery and narration of the visual album and Black women’s responses to it. There was a little bit of a hallelujah moment amongst Black women that no one else was privy to and it was beautiful. How did it make Beyoncé feel to be embraced in that way? I’m like, it was gooood for me. Was it gooood for her, too?
Kinitra: Whew! Books? I hate lists like these because you always leave something out. But I’m going to recommend three and leave the other three up to Kameelah.
Kameelah: Mercy! Here goes: Sassafras, Cypress, & Indigo by Ntozake Shange because the journey to womanhood is arduous. It’s not a book, but so necessary to understand what Beyoncé is doing—Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” And ironically, bell hooks’ Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery.
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Dr. Kinitra Brooks is the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Dr. Brooks specializes in the study of black women, genre fiction, and popular culture. She currently has two other books in print: Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror (Rutgers UP 2017), a critical treatment of black women in science fiction, fantasy, and horror and Sycorax’s Daughters (Cedar Grove Publishing 2017), an edited volume of short horror fiction written by black women. Her current research focuses on portrayals of the Conjure Woman in popular culture. Dr. Brooks recently served as the Advancing Equity Through Research Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University during the 2018-2019 academic year.
Kameelah L. Martin is Professor of African American Studies and English at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, where she is also Director of the African American Studies Program. Dr. Martin’s research explores the lore cycle of the conjure woman, or black priestess, as an archetype in literature and visual texts. She is author of two monographs: Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, & Other Such Hoodoo (Palgrave 2013) and Envisioning Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics: African Spirituality in American Cinema (Lexington 2016). She is the Assistant Editor of the College Language Association Journal and has published in Studies in the Literary Imagination,Black Women, Gender, & Families, as well as the African American National Biography. She has edited special issues of Genealogy, South Atlantic Review, and co-edited a section of the Routledge Anthology of African American Rhetoric (2018).
Tamura Lomax received her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in Religion where she specialized in Black Religion and Black Diaspora Studies and developed expertise in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Black British and U.S. Black Cultural Studies. In 2018, Dr. Lomax published her first single authored monograph, Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture (Duke University Press). She also organized and guest edited the special issue, “Black Bodies in Ecstasy: Black Women, the Black Church, and the Politics of Pleasure” (Black Theology: An International Journal, Nov 2018). In 2017, Dr. Lomax curated #BlackSkinWhiteSin, a discourse on sex, violence, and the Black Church. In 2014, she published Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Cultural Productions (Palgrave Macmillan), a co-authored edited volume with Rhon S. Manigault-Bryant and Carol B. Duncan. She is currently at work on her latest book, Raising Non-Toxic Sons in White Supremacist America. She is the co-founder, CEO, and visionary of The Feminist Wire. For more or to conact, visit Bios.
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By Sheila Alexander-Reid
Editors’ Note: This herstory was written and read by Sheila Alexander-Reid, founder of the Women in the Life Association, to millennial Black queer women and Black lesbians who honored her at a 2018 Black History Month celebration of community activist elders in the District of Columbia. The Feminist Wire is pleased to publish this affirmation of Black lesbian herstory on February 18, 2019, the 85th birthday of the late Black, Lesbian, Feminist, Mother, Warrior, Poet, Audre Lorde.
“Some of Us Did Not Die
June Jordan, Some Of Us Did Not Die: Selected Essays, Civets Books
We’re Still Here”
I open with the above quote from the acclaimed Black feminist, bisexual, poet, essayist, and playwright June Jordan because the Black lesbian community is facing erasure in the age of the queer generation. I am inspired by this new cadre of Black queer-led organizations driving the conversation in our communities. You all are doing racial justice work thru a Black radical, queer, feminist lens, and we also need to ensure that there is always intergenerational continuity.
This is precisely why I am elated to be honored along with my dear friends and colleagues Dr. Imani Woody, and Rayceen Pendarvis by GildaPapoose Collective, MelaNation and BYP100 DC for our contributions to the Black Queer Community. You are all dedicated visionaries, fierce activists, and compassionately committed organizers. We are in an intergenerational relay race for our survival. I received the baton from Black lesbian and gay elders who preceded me in the early 1990s. I’m still in this race and I joyously forward the baton to all of you knowing that you will run longer and farther than I will see in my lifetime.
In 1992, I started Women in the Life, Inc., an events management company that created safe spaces for Black lesbians to interact through dance parties, concerts, fundraisers, and open mic poetry sessions in over 50 locations in Washington, D.C. alone, not to mention Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Atlanta. Some of the many artists featured at Women in the Life events included Grace Jones, C+C Music Factory, CeCe Peniston, Meshell
Over a ten-year period, with the help of friends Charlene Hamilton, Darlene Rogers, Chris Vera, Lois Alexander, the late Phyllis Croom and so many more, I published a total of 86 issues of Women in the Life Magazine, which addressed issues that impacted our community both in Washington, D.C., throughout the United States, and internationally. The magazine was distributed nationally.
In its second decade, I transformed Women in the Life, LLC into the Women in the Life Association, a social justice, non-profit organization to serve the same demographic, but in a new capacity. Two of its former board members are in this room today, my sister honoree, Dr. Imani Woody, founder of Mary’s House for Older Adults, and my mother and first role model, Dr. Clarice Reid
The primary program of the Women in the Life Association was the Wanda’s Will Project. Named in honor of Wanda Alston, it was an initiative that provided free legal workshops provided by attorneys to educate the LGBTQ community on the critical need to execute wills and advanced directives.
Wanda Alston was a strategic organizer, dear friend, and mentor who held my position as head of the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs when she was murdered by her next-door neighbor. She was a woman on fire, a force to be reckoned with, the kind of warrior you want on your team. Wanda’s death miraculously brought a fractious, segregated community together in shock, in grief, and soon into action. The Wanda’s Will Project was created in her name because she died without a will and her family did not honor her wishes nor did they acknowledge her partner of several years. This was in 2006 when there weren’t any civil unions, domestic partnerships or same-sex marriages to legally protect one’s partner.
While doing this work at Women in
The grassroots work that we all did on behalf of our Black lesbian communities was vital to our survival. Long before the internet existed, we created safe communities for Black lesbians without websites, chat groups, or blogs. We spread local and national messages that impacted our communities virally without social media. We built networks. We built movements.
We created health programs when we didn’t have data to tell us what we already knew – that our community, the Black LGBT community, was dying disproportionately from breast cancer, AIDS, hypertension, and other diseases on a daily basis and no one was coming to save us. There were very few models to follow. We cobbled and created groundbreaking historical work — Black lesbian feminist work, social justice work, Black community work — without much if any, funding. Funders used a myopic, insufficient lens for metrics to decide if we were successful. By this, I mean success for a Black lesbian organization will not look the same as success at HRC (Human Rights Campaign) or even a Black gay organization. We didn’t have the resources or the structure. We should not have been held to a wealthy, privileged gay standard that didn’t apply to our realities. Therefore, capacity building funding was not consistent. Pharmaceutical companies poured money into male organizations promoting HIV/AIDS cocktail
Fast forward to 2018, and very few are speaking up for a community of Black lesbian/dykes over forty who feel invisible. Additionally, my demographic needs to take responsibility for not reaching out to the under forty-generation. We don’t have to buy-in to the erasure of the L-word. We don’t have to assume that queer is a negative word that equates the dismissal of lesbians who came before them.
Older privileged LGBTQ people don’t go off into obscurity. So, why should we? Their stories become movies, white papers, and historical context for the next generation. So, why aren’t Black lesbian voices, stories, strategies, and narratives viewed as valuable? They need to be protected and then leveraged as an integral part of a new intergenerational agenda.
Like sister organizations in New York, Oakland, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Sacramento, Women in the Life was created out of an idea to fill a void. Today’s void is the missing voice for the Black lesbian/
My life’s work has also brought me face to face with the next generation of very diverse LGBTQ leaders who are deeply committed to advancing the cause of social justice and fighting to retain the freedoms and rights attained by my generation and the preceding generations. I am impressed and inspired by this new generation of Black lesbian and queer feminist activists. This mantel, this torch that is being passed, is in safe-keeping.
Please don’t dismiss our strategies as irrelevant. Instead, build upon them and take them to the next level. We did not get here by accident. Millennials can benefit from our work, not necessarily our methods, but our work. This should not be a one-way street. Our herstories and your contemporary realities shouldn’t have to be pieced together. We need to strategically intertwine the past with the present to best prepare for our collective future. What we don’t know is what form it will take? What toll will it take on us to produce it and to maintain the continuum dedicated to changing the future? How do we do transformative work while we work to transform ourselves? What will it take to continue building Black Lesbian/Dyke/Queer Resilience? Let’s find the answers together because twenty-years from now you will be facing parallel questions with the next generation.
I close with the self-defined Black, Lesbian, Feminist, Mother, Warrior, Poet, Audre Lorde,who said,
“Without
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, (The Crossing Press Feminist Series, 1984), 112community there is no liberation. … butcommunity must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”
Author’s note: Many thanks to Dr. Christina Smith, Affinity Social Services’ co-founder, activist, scholar, and respected comrade who completed her doctoral dissertation on the history of Black lesbian organizations. It was a conversation with Chris in 2018 that changed my perspective on a collective future, and inspired me to both
About the Author…
Sheila Alexander-Reid, a Black lesbian, and proud Spelman College centennial class graduate has championed causes for the LGBTQ community, young people, women of color, and survivors of domestic violence for more than 25-years. Alexander-Reid currently serves as Director of the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs in Washington, D.C. In the early
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By Zillah Eisenstein
I am writing this just a few weeks after the Women’s marches of 2019. Tens of thousands of women — non-binary, trans, gender variant, queer, cis, disabled, every color, rich and poor — came out into the streets to march together to say it is time to dump the sexist/racist authoritarian; the macho fascist demagogue.
This is a chaotic time: there have been many strikes; many feminisms; many work slow-downs; many working classes in this moment. This amazing plurality of resistances is both a dilemma and an opening. I am looking at the possibility: the opportunity to see that there are new consciousnesses with many bits to them—women workers seeing themselves in their own complexity—at work, at home, as consumers, as emotional laborers; all of it. And, at the same time, the different iterations of #MeToo and its movements—in Hollywood to the prisons—allow new camaraderie.
It is a known publicized and exposed fact that women of every color, especially Black women, suffer sexual intimidation, harassment, and violence everywhere and anywhere. White supremacy has been re-exposed from the bottom up by Black Lives Matter activism and from the top by a racist president.
The present moment/s simply intensify most people’s fragility but also courage. Trumpism has created so much pain and suffering—from DACA young people (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) to trans people in the military, to Black families losing their children to police violence, to a poor woman looking for the morning after pill to the almost one million workers who lost their pay checks in the government shutdown. All of us have seen the food pantries and the heartbreaking stories—how thousands of federal workers live from paycheck to paycheck and their precarity felt like ours. And, a new kind of working class that has been percolating for decades has now exploded forth.
This working class is like the old and not like the old. It is maybe more different than it is similar. And, it is more dispersed and uniquely constituted and located in different sites. I am not thinking we should rebuild the radicalism of the old working class but rather that the new radicalism must be found. This is to find our strength by coalescing together in and from our many marches, strikes, and movements to build alliances together; from the striking teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and California (and even to Greece), to the TSA workers, to the flight attendants, to the air traffic controllers, to #BlackLivesMatter.
There is a rare possibility of an expansive new working class—of all genders, races, and locations of labor. Workers of all kinds are too many to ignore: the Air Traffic Controllers who slowed down and closed Newark, Philadelphia, and LaGuardia Airports, the TSA workers who purposely did not show up for work, and Sara Nelson, president of the Flight Attendants Union, who called for a General Strike at the AFL/CIO labor movement meeting a day before the government reopened. She said: “go back with the Fierce Urgency of NOW to talk with your Locals and International unions about all workers joining together to end this Shutdown with a General Strike. We can do this. Together. Si se puede. Every gender, race, culture, and creed. We have the power.”
These workers were the reason Trump was forced to re-open the government. AND, also, don’t forget the almost one million federal workers who educated the rest of us about the hardship and heartbreak of living paycheck to paycheck. So, be my guest and cheer for Pelosi’s brinkmanship and skills. But do not forget this: workers, tons of them, women and their movements, opened the government. Individualism (and emphasis on individuals) is the language and rhetoric of neoliberalism, even if it cheers on a woman.
It is also time to stop assuming that there is one unified women’s movement, or Women’s March for that matter. Let us think, instead, as so many are, of a movement of movements—of alliances, and coalitions, where we have to relearn to negotiate our differences, such that those conversations themselves become key building blocks of insurgency.
Forget the “catfight” depiction of the organizers of the original 2017 women’s march as racist and/or anti-Semitic. There are conflicts but they reflect the wide-ranging political issues that are part of the resistance today, and not as the media likes to profess – a sign of our weakness and destruction, as Michelle Goldberg would have it. The differences of and in feminisms is a sign of political acumen and activist/honest struggle against white supremacy.
The determination and resilience of women and feminists of every kind, here and abroad, are developing at an astonishing speed not to be deterred. So, do not expect the New York Times to advertise our revolution; it rather tries to disassemble it.
History always gives us new possibilities. The #BlackLivesMatter, the #SayHerName, and the #MeToo! movements cut swaths of new loyalties across more singular sites. While sexual violence and intimidation have escalated under neoliberalism, the resistance to it has now been mobilized, nationally and internationally. Similarly, poverty and unequal wages now unites restaurant workers and teachers and most wage-earning women into a newly shared class-consciousness, often global. Our lives continue to radicalize us.
There are women now governing the CIA and military sites, and there are neo-liberal feminists who support a #Feminism4the1%. But the 2018-midterm elections were a huge gain for women of color and radical women standing for Palestine and for socialism. Alliances and movements outside the electoral arena will be crucial to any radical and revolutionary progress. And, the alliances between different/differing priorities actually help to radicalize our standpoint.
I, along with many of my anti-racist and socialist feminist sisters under the skin are not giving up—especially not now when we face a horrific and punishing politics of Trumpism that threatens the lives of too many, here and abroad.
Marches and strikes and collective actions restore us. The shared bodily presence empowers and sustains and builds trust. NPR’s Asma Khalid interviewed several women about the Women’s March (2019). One woman living in a suburb of Detroit said her local group was going to march because what they were doing was bigger than any problem with the national organizers. Whatever their inadequacies are she felt that defeating Donald Trump in 2020 was urgent and trumped everything else, so to speak.
There were hundreds, maybe thousands of marches this year. In my state of New York alone women marched in Woodstock, Syracuse, Seneca Falls, Elmira, to name a few. There has not been much coverage of this dispersed sustained resistance and rebellion or the staunch determination of it all.
Remember, or learn, that feminism saw itself in the early 70s as structureless; there would not be a hierarchy of privilege established by individuals who lead. Let us not forget this as we coalesce from our differing movements. And standing against white privilege and its supremacy must undergird the accountability of each of us.
Donald is not the biggest problem but he is the problem for now, and if we can use him to unite across our differences, well why wouldn’t we—the inclusive “we”—do that? Last year women held signs on our marches depicting every kind of wish and hope. There was a generosity in the communities brought together. Unity did not mean homogeneity, but it did mean a strategic coming together.
I am in total support with striking and marching in this moment against Trump’s brand of white supremacist capitalist misogyny. I am also ready to push for the most radical electoral campaign to defeat Trump in 2020. I am sure that we must offer an anti-racist socialist feminist radical indictment of the misery he has created to defeat his radical hatred.
So, reform is never enough but fighting for reforms can lay the basis for revolutionary consciousness and commitment—even if few of us know what revolution will look like in this very complex and messy time. Let us build movements together to build an anti-racist socialist feminist working class.
Revolutionary acts are never simply individual and yet individuals in their movements constitute revolutionary process. So, it is not enough to get angry. It is not enough to simply ask to be heard or be seen or recognized. You cannot do it yourself (DIY); you must do it with others (DIWO).
Many feminists already know that liberal or neo-liberal feminism is not enough to make democracy work. So, as “we” demand more women in Congress and in our State Houses let us remember that getting the vote did not revolutionize society. It is crucial that we have the vote—even though too many of our votes are being suppressed and not counted and smothered by an outdated slave based Electoral College.
For now—let us keep marching, and registering voters, and campaigning, and protesting against police violence, and white supremacist penal codes and prisons, and climate change, and for a living wage, and against sexual violence, and for disabled people’s rights—and for it all. This is what the new anti-racist feminist working class agenda looks like.
Let us develop a strategic feminist political action method:
Try to connect and harmonize when possible but be honest about the differences and conflicts. Unity is not needed but shared purpose is. Stop looking for sameness and celebrate similarity instead—we are simultaneously differently connected. Be suspicious of hierarchy—use structures without white and class privilege. Continually shift the structures of organization, utilizing some new organizers alongside veteran ones. Make sure Black and women of color are leading. Look for the connections between reform and revolution rather than seeing them as opposites—keep pushing to make a reform bigger in its outcome. Be on high alert against corporate interests and ownership and branding of anything. Keep nurturing an understanding of historical oppression in today’s inequalities.
Recognize that anti-racist feminist organizing must be mobile, reparative, and restorative. Give this work and political status, theorize it, strategize it, and act on it. There are new possibilities for a socialist women of colors feminisms. Stop over-personalizing our politics but politicize ourselves in personal ways.
I want to keep marching, risking, wondering, striking, and connecting towards a #Feminism4the99.
About the author…
Zillah Eisenstein is a ground breaking political thinker, writer and activist who is always looking to find new anti-racist socialist feminist pathways. She is the author of more than twelve books and hundreds of articles detailing the continual struggles for social, racial, economic, environmental, gender, sexual, and bodily justice by women of all colors across the globe. Her newest book, ABOLITONIST SOCIALIST FEMINISM; Radicalizing the Next Revolution, will be published, spring, 2019. She has lived in Ithaca New York throughout these decades of national and global activism. She is Professor Emerita of Political Theory, Ithaca College, NY. Visit her website to access her writings.
Today is Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I almost hate that we commemorated a holiday in his honor because I’m convinced iconicity leads to erasure. And though the epitome of Black Moses, he still has so much to teach us. That said, I want to honor King by sharing some of his ideas and engaging some of his problems. Not to say “he was great, but…” but rather to say “he was great, and…” as well as to model how we might lift up and hold the Black Moses’s we love accountable. Black feminism demands that much.
Full disclosure: I had a serious crush on King and Malcolm X back in the day. I was infatuated by their Black radical voice and political courage. As a high school teen in a predominantly white and wealthy community, I longed for encounters with Black radical righteous indignation, which at that time predominantly came in the form of the Black male voice. Or at least that’s what was accessible to me. To be honest, I hadn’t awakened to Black feminism yet. I’m a child of the Black Church and a Black Baptist preacher. Black Moses and the Black male radical voice were Black righteous discontentment in my young mind. And it didn’t hurt that both King and X were aesthetically pleasing to my lonely Black teenage eyes in my predominately white context. One day we gone talk about how falling in love with the political mind may lead to all kinds of emotional feelings. Anyway, I used to record their speeches on cassette tapes and pop them in at night as I fell asleep. I memorized their talking points by heart. They made me feel protected, brave, and proud. However, it wasn’t until graduate school that I got to appreciate King for more than his speeches and soundbites. I got to learn about the ideas behind his speeches. The latter of which my husband and I respected so much that we named our youngest son Martin.
What We Can Learn from Dr. King
King was right about a great many things, but he was not perfect. His political rootedness in agape raised questions as it also suspended self-care. And his belief in ultimate human goodness at times seemed idyllic rather than pragmatic. I do wonder what he’d have to say about white mob mentality, the courts, the color-line, the administration, racism, and democracy today in the post-Civil Rights and Obama era. I wonder what he’d think about the government shutdown, the subsequent demand for free labor, and the separation of children from their families at the border. I wonder what he’d say about the new tax laws, privileging the wealthy and further marginalizing the poor and working class. I imagine he’d say that power not rooted in love is reckless and abusive, yet “power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice…and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.” And more, that humans have the capacity and higher calling to achieve a more moral and just world, despite what we’re seeing. I imagine he’d tell us we have a moral duty to keep resisting anyhow, that it’s immoral to leave injustices imposed by society uncritiqued, and that the sacred value of human personality should ceaselessly oppose every act of discrimination and injustice that degrades personality, wherever and whenever it exists. In short, he’d tell us to keep on and stay the course.
And this is why I think King, our quintessential Black Moses, would appreciate what I’m about to say next in the spirit of keeping on and satyagraha (holding on to truth), which guided his life. King’s lived personalism, his theory of somebodiness, and his notion of love as a methodology were beautiful and brilliant but also anemic. It is well known that he was a rabid womanizer and evidenced problematic commitments to toxic masculinity. Audre Lorde, Barbara Jordan, and Angela Davis told us how the Civil Rights movement was grossly patriarchal and sexist. Ella Baker let us know the same in terms of King and other Black male Baptist preachers in the movement specifically. Delores Williams once said King’s “beloved community” and theory of somebodiness should be understood in terms of his sexism. Did sexism not disrupt his vision of “beloved community,” inherent dignity and worth, and innate sacredness? Here’s the rub: Like so many others, King was hard on racial politics and democratic ideals and soft on sex and gender. His family life and situatedness in the Black Church provide clues here. It’s not uncommon for Black families, communities, and churches to uplift Black people, including Black women, while participating in sexism and patriarchy (as well as homophobia and trans-antagonism). King often said Tubman and Truth were the forerunners to the Civil Rights movement, while ascribing to and benefitting from the Black Moses leadership approach.
And before we make excuses for him only being one person, one, social solidarity doesn’t take much (ask Frederick Douglass), and two, there was opportunity. To be clear, inherent human sacredness, dignity, worth, and beloved community in the most concrete sense cannot entail womanizing, patriarchy, and sexism. Women “must be treated as ends and never as mere means,” too. There was also political opportunity. Of course, there was the Women’s Movement. But also, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act barred discrimination in employment on the basis of race and sex in 1964. And the Executive Order 11375 (1967), which expanded President Lyndon Johnson’s affirmative action policy of 1965 to cover discrimination based on gender, made it so federal agencies and contractors were inclusive of women and racial minorities, and so that they could enjoy the same educational and employment opportunities as white males. Sex and gender were on the table. If nothing else, Black feminists and Black women movement workers kept it at the forefront. It seems King’s belief in the courts, democracy, moral law, and somebodiness would have led him to consider his politics towards women as well as to expand his ideas of moral duty and agape, particularly if power at its best looks like not only correcting everything that stands against justice but implementing a love ethic that is inclusive, humanizing, and impartial.
What might it have meant for King’s ethics of love, democracy, and somebodiness to embody the circular and collective leadership and politics of Ella Baker? I don’t know. Ultimately, I think King needed more time. I think he needed more time to work through the kinks in his theories of agape and somebodiness. He needed more time to work through his idea of democracy – because not only did it exclude intracommunal material practice, it was rooted in Hobbesian and Lockean social contract theory, which understood “natural rights” and “rational men” in terms of property owners, white men, exclusion, and deception. He needed more time to think through establishing beloved community in a nation that is fundamentally flawed, whose formation was essentially immoral, and whose power brokers are largely antiblack. He needed more time to develop a critique of the Black Church and familial structure, which informed his messianic leadership style and thus consistently calls for its Black Moses. And more, he needed more time to critique his personal contradictions, which limited his ability to be radically inclusive.
But I think he would’ve gotten there.
And it is because of this, despite his flaws, I still think he is one of the greatest men to ever live. We’d do well to learn from both his radical vision and his mistakes.
P.S. We can show love and offer valuable correction at the same time. It doesn’t make the burden of the color-line obscure. It makes our Black radical voice more powerful.
Tamura Lomax received her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in Religion where she specialized in Black Religion and Black Diaspora Studies and developed expertise in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Black British and U.S. Black Cultural Studies. In 2018, Dr. Lomax published her first single authored monograph, Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture (Duke University Press). She also organized and guest edited the special issue, “Black Bodies in Ecstasy: Black Women, the Black Church, and the Politics of Pleasure” (Black Theology: An International Journal, Nov 2018). In 2017, Dr. Lomax curated #BlackSkinWhiteSin, a discourse on sex, violence, and the Black Church. In 2014, she published Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Cultural Productions (Palgrave Macmillan), a co-authored edited volume with Rhon S. Manigault-Bryant and Carol B. Duncan. She is currently at work on her latest book, Raising Non-Toxic Sons in White Supremacist America. She is the co-founder, CEO, and visionary of The Feminist Wire. For more or to conact, visit Bios.
W. E. B. Du Bois’s poignant words in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” is scripture for Black folk in America. Citizenry after three centuries-plus of bondage ain’t been no crystal staircase. Black folks have navigated feral and diabolical racialized hostility since European contact, invasion, occupation, conquest, and colonization. To be clear, the systemic violence of theft of bodies, culture, identities, and histories; foreign rule; forced African dispersal; the trans-Atlantic slave trade; and the European scramble for African territory, caused not only alienation between people, land, and culture, but laid claim to the spirit of African diasporic being, identity, independence, and thriving.
Today, when we think of the slave trade in America, many think of a system long gone that ended over a century and half ago. We think of [often a watered-down version of] what was, not what yet still is. We think of the magical Civil War that ended slavery and gave everyone shared access to the American Dream, not the reality that the same demonic colonial tools, political structure, and economic system that captured, enslaved, and traded an estimated 12 million Africans from Central and West Africa between the 15th and 19th centuries to be “slaves for life,” along with any offspring, still exists. Many of us are the offspring of Africans interpreted not as humans, but legal property aka cargo aka merchandise and sold to people who owned cocoa, cotton, coffee, tobacco, and sugar plantations. We are the descendants of domestics and field hands whose bylines, last names, diaries, testimonies, secrets, and seared flesh serve as reminders of our unique connection – to each other, land, experience, and the color-line. As Aimé Césaire reminds us in Discourse on Colonialism (1950), the dehumanizing, poisonous, and barbaric nature of coloniality, was distilled into the veins of our society. While we no longer live in a colonial context and “the official apparatus may have been removed…the political, economic, and cultural links established by colonial domination still remain.”
America is replete with colonial artifacts. Policing, mass incarceration, Black death, immigration laws, the juridical system, and the maintenance of socioeconomic class lines tell us this much. Neocoloniality is evidenced in and through a number of social hierarchies and forms of power and control intended to strip the Black diaspora of any semblance of freedom, justice, humanity, equity, or citizenship. And it means to stifle not only our liberation but our image. The collective battle for political freedom and from representational fabrication as darkness, evil, monsters, criminal, immoral, lazy, hyper-sexual, and so on, is real. The quest to be seen as ends rather than exploitable means to an end is real. And in the unyielding face of forced labor, joblessness, intimidation, police brutality, taxation, racial terror, theft, rape, incarceration, and murder, the 1960s signage and what came to represent the collective call of the social movement for humanity, “I Am A Man,” still rings true. In many ways, “I Am A Man” became a sublimation and lynchpin for naming Black oppression beneath the veil of the color-line.
The problem of the color-line impacts the African diaspora everywhere, forging a sense of collective fugitivity, multi-consciousness, and Black protectionism. Black folks are forever faced with questions and anxieties around belonging, place, personhood, and community. It’s only normal, and particularly in America, to protect the race for dear life. In many instances, “we’re all we got.” Simultaneously, it’s these realities and entanglements that shape Black desire for Black Moses – that magical genius warrior who will eventually and heroically save the Black diaspora in America: men, women, and children, and in that order. Antebellum Black radical resistance, the Black Reconstruction, and the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement taught us that Black radical power, opposition, genius, and creativity came through many identities, persons, expressions, and cultural forms, with each revealing a range of collective needs and responses to interlocking oppressions. However, it seems the Jim Crow era ushered in a particular love affair with Black Moses, the revolutionary Black male figure and leader of the race making real political moves via speeches, marches, organizing, and direct attacks on American politics.
Such a figure stands for Black manhood without apology and subsequently represents Black power, citizenry, humanity, and liberation. The merging between the quest for Black manhood and Black power, citizenship, humanity, and liberation is more than I can get into here. The short of it is, heteropatriarchy is a pillar of American empire, which equates manhood to the state, state power, and “natural rights,” and naturalizes the quest for male domination as a natural moral order (within the nation-state, institutions, local communities, and interpersonally) and the dominion of male needs as symbolic of power, liberation, and the well-being of the collective. True enough, Harriet Tubman was also referred to as Black Moses. Race, sex, and gender politics were more fluid during slavery. Post-slavery demanded a special place and role for an appropriation of Black patriarchy in Black families, communities, and institutions. Black Moses became symbolic for a particular kind of Black male leadership and such leadership became emblematic of Black power, progress, liberation, and thus what it meant to be free, powerful, human, and whole.
Black Moses, the liberator and exemplar of Blackness, fights on our behalf against the color-line and stubborn colonial artifacts such as the remains of Dixie, unregulated violence, white power structures, second-class citizenship, et al. And because of this he exists in somewhat of a protected Black class. Because he’s working on our behalf. Because he does good in the community. Because he’s fighting for social structures and programs needed for Black liberation. Because he understands not only the color-line but the transnational plight of the Black diaspora to be linked. Because as the saying goes, none of us are free until we are all free. However, given the history and context of race and racial oppression, many of us refuse to see or challenge the blind spots. We give in to racial solidarity and Black protectionism due to our shared place and history, and many of us do so at our own expense.
Du Bois was right. The problem of the 20th– and 21st– century is the color-line. But as Black feminists have been saying forever, it’s the intersections where race, class, sex, gender, and sexuality meet, too. Contrary to popular belief, Black feminism isn’t the enemy of collective Black liberation or Black men, families, and communities. Black feminism is an inclusive critical system of beliefs, politics, discourse, and social movement aimed at saving our collective Black lives and ending racist, sexist, heterosexist, trans-antagonistic, classist, imperialist, and capitalist exploitation and oppression. Black women and girls take up special space as both Black and women, and for some of us, as both advocates of Black life and women’s rights, we carry the burden of both the color-line and the gender-line on our shoulders. And we are more often than not pressured to choose one over the other; to note one as more oppressive than the other; to claim one as more or less significant; to prove our racial allegiance – through our lives, activism, servitude, third-classness, and too often our silence. But some of us carry signs fighting white supremacy, damning the history of slavery, collective racial oppression, rape, and breeding while concealing and swallowing down both interracial intracommunal violences. We are not supposed to talk about the latter…because the color-line is the Black problem…because white supremacy…because whatever our intracommunal experiences white men did it first and worse. And we surely aren’t supposed to say anything bad about Black Moses or his kinfolk in our communities.
Unchecked racial allegiance ain’t never liberated nobody. Black feminists understand the history of Black diasporic theft and oppression and how it’s operating in the contemporary moment as much as anyone. We understand neocoloniality got us collectively $%^&#@ up. We are not unaware. And we certainly aren’t working on behalf of white supremacy, as some like to argue – because in the words of Patricia Hill Collins, some see gender equality with Black women as defeat, disempowerment, and lack of entitlement. But some of us are of the Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Anna Julia Cooper, Ella Baker, Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, Michele Wallace, Combahee River Collective ilk. Black women’s critiques of the Black Moses model pivotal to the Black nuclear family/political project and paradigmatic for Black communal, social, political, and religious leadership ain’t nothin new. Believe it or not, there’s a way to hold our collective history, good works, and bad ideology and deeds in tension. That is, we can critique white supremacy, show racial unity, appreciate Black radical efforts towards progress, and hold our folks accountable at the same time. More, there’s simply no way to talk about ancient civilization, colonization, North American enslavement, and 20th and 21st century oppression and social movements without also talking about the experiences, roles, and histories of Black diasporic women – good and bad. Simultaneously, we cannot ignore how our quest for humanity and ultimately Black Moses, led and continues to lead to intracommunal heteropatriarchal sexism, homophobia, and trans-antagonism.
The color-line is real but Black Moses and Black protectionism won’t save us. Truth, Cooper, and Baker been told us this model won’t liberate us. Check out the speeches “Woman’s Rights” and “When Woman Gets Her Rights Man Will Be Right”), the essay, “The Status of Woman in America,” and the documentary Fundi: The Ella Baker Story (1981). Sometimes Black Moses righteously and powerfully advocates for Black pride, power, independence, and socio-political-economic unionizing while partaking in intracommunal oppression. This can’t go unchecked. The idea that intracommunal criticism halts Black liberative efforts is a lie. We have to start critiquing problematic ideals, models, paradigms, and folk in our communities, even when they’ve done a lot of good (or made good music…like R. Kelly or made us shout and raise our hands…like James Cleveland). Criticism is not only an act of love but self-care and intracommunal preservation. And if we can be honest, the demand for intracommunal silence around sex, gender, and sexual oppression in the name of racial solidarity is really for Black cisgender heterosexual men – because Black folk have no problem critiquing Black women and Black lgbtqia people. Because if Tubman were alive today, we’d be hearing all kinds of criticisms about her politics, her leadership style, her gender identity and performance, her looks, how she talks to Black men, her sex life, her multiple husbands, her single motherhood, and so on.
Somebody send this article to Tamika Mallory, leader of the Women’s March currently facing harsh criticism for refusing to distance herself from Minister Louis Farrakhan. Sis is out here carrying the burden of the color-line and its centrality in Black struggle and the Black liberation tradition, neocoloniality, Black Moses, the quest for Black identity and it’s coiling with aspirational patriarchal Black manhood, and Black feminism along with it’s fundamental intersections between race, class, sex, and gender all on her shoulders. Yet while fighting for women’s rights and against white racism, including liberal white women’s racial allegiances, racial exclusions, and antiblackness in social movements, which Black feminists have been calling out since forever (see Sojourner Truth and here and here and here and here or just google “black feminist syllabi”), she’s seesawing her way between her allegiances to Black feminist politics and Black Moses. And she is neither the first nor the last to find themselves between the hard rock of Black feminism and the hard place of Black protectionism. It’s hard out here for Black feminists. Our racial history sometimes demands allegiances to people who’ve said or done harmful things. Thus some of us practice feminist politics while protecting our heteropatriarchal friends. Truth is, they are often people we love and are in community with. Sometimes we look up to them. And if we can keep it all the way real, sometimes we appreciate and find value in them — in Black Moses, Black male power, and yes, even Black male domination for some. Sometimes we actually do think that when Black men get their rights everything else will be alright.
Not that Mallory believes any of this. Admittedly, we’ve never met or spoken. But there is an especially nuanced and complex road that she’s traveling as a Black woman activist being called to stand against white racism and sexism, on one hand, and against a powerful Black Moses by white media, on the other. It’s easy to do the former. It’s easy to forcefully and unambiguously name white supremacy and to call out white, white passing, and non-Black women. It’s easy to denounce the color-line and neocoloniality that shapes our lives. The hard part is standing with and for Black men (and women) while also just as explicitly holding them accountable. And I don’t think Mallory does this with regard to Farrakhan. While she is expressly clear that she doesn’t agree with Farrakhan (and here) on all things, Black feminism calls for a more layered and nuanced response, not a rhetorical tap dance. We know she disagrees with his statements on anti-Semitism, sexism, and homophobia. However, the repetitive and rehearsed response, “I don’t agree with these statements,” is not enough. “I don’t agree” or “I critique systems and structures, not people” is a cheap way of refusing to offer a necessary critique, which Mallory is most certainly capable of doing when it comes to white supremacy. But again this is tricky terrain.
Before I’m accused of working for white supremacy let me say this: I applaud Mallory for refusing to dispose of Farrakhan.
She’s not the first to be asked. White Americans have been demanding Black activists to dispose of him in order to access allying and resources and to perform proper and acceptable Blackness for decades. And Farrakhan is not the first. Divide and conquer is an age old tool. That said, while Black folks love our Black Moses’s, the media and political powers that be hates them. Thus, after reading about the DNC’s move to distance itself from the Women’s March and watching Mallory on The View, I wrote the following,
While I get the critical space black women activists take up as both black and women, and more, as both advocates of black life and women’s rights, I feel like Mallory should own her loyalty to Farrakhan. She doesn’t need to disown him (dis/owning is a white supremacist antiblack project – I prefer critique and accountability). But she does need to be more forthright about why she’s not. And more, about why she sees him as the GOAT. She should own that race may possibly trump all else in her radical politics. And she should own that she wasn’t likely thinking about his other harmful positions, including those on Mike Tyson, R. Kelly, and rape culture, when uplifting his racial politics. However, as a black feminist, I’m troubled that he’s even in the middle of this, getting all of this airtime, and that she’s yet holding onto him with the whole “I go wherever my people are…including prisons.” That analogy was interesting, to say the least. But also, it felt grossly disingenuous. It would be great if she worked through these nuances and perhaps excused herself from the march while doing so (so that she doesn’t cause further harm). She can always come back and/or work behind the scenes. In the meantime, I continue to side-eye **any** black feminist refusing to call Farrakhan out on, at minimum, his sex and gender politics. I recently re/listened to the recording of him included in NO! The Rape Documentary, by Aishah Shahidah Simmons, where he talks about Mike Tyson’s rape charge, and I was sickened to my stomach.
I went on to comment,
I really want her to critique Farrakhan AND white media for requesting that she and black folk in general dis/own radical black voices. I find their outrage disingenuous as well.
I applaud Mallory for her refusal to dis/own, not for her refusal to offer radical critique on a mass-mediated platform. I applaud her for naming white supremacy and white privilege and for making lucidly clear the systemic, structural, institutional, and interpersonal violences of the color-line. I applaud her for balancing the history of womanhood and contact, conquest, and colonization. And I even applaud her for wanting to protect Black Moses, given all he represents to Black communities both figuratively and realistically. Such protectionism feels like protecting the race and standing boldly and in solidarity in the face of racist politics and media. It feels like a win for Black humanity and liberation and especially for Black men – and particularly as Black manhood and Black Moses have come to equate to each. And while I understand what reads as contradictions between Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism and Mallory’s radical vision of freedom for all people from all oppressions, I won’t get into that here. There is a complex relationship between Jewish people, whiteness, white passing folks, and Black folks. Let’s just say, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, diasporic dispersal, the scramble for Africa, antiblackness throughout the Americas, and the quest for whiteness didn’t yield us any friends. The Portuguese, the British, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, the Caribbean, and those others occupying the western empire were all happy to engage in New World trading and the oppression of humans. And those groups later given access to whiteness in the New World, despite their own oppressions, have been equally happy to partake in the structures and fruits of antiblackness. That said, it’s a tangled web that needs more space and time.
But what of Farrakhan’s previous statements about rape? What of how he claims to hate rape and rapists, on one hand, while calling survivors liars and dabbling in rape culture and rape jokes, on the other? What of how he explicitly stands against rape, and especially white male rapists, the raping of young boys in the Catholic Church, and the rape of Black women by white enslavers but when he discusses Black men like Mike Tyson and R. Kelly he moves towards discourses on forgiveness, genius, the divinity within, and how all have sinned (grace clearly reserved for Black men)? What of how he exclaims women are sacred and to be honored and jezebels who lie in the same breath? In a 1992 speech on Tyson he said the following:
You bring a hawk into the chicken yard and wonder why the chicken got eaten up. You bring Mike to a beauty contest and all these fine foxes just parading in front of Mike. Mike’s eyes begin to dance like a hungry man looking at a Wendy’s beef burger or something. She said “no Mike no.” I mean how many times, sisters, have you said “No” and you mean “Yes” all of the time. Wait, wait, I’m talking to the women. We’re going to talk now. You see, the days of the bs (bull shit) is all over. You’re not dealing with a man that don’t know you and the damn deceitful games that you play” (Transcript of NO! by Aishah Shahidah Simmons) (You can listen to the rest of the speech here: 1:47:00-2:14:06)
Does this not require precise Black feminist righteous rage? I encourage readers to listen to the video and sit with the male approval and laughter in the audience. We can’t be out here calling Black Moses the GOAT and not naming this – not as Black feminists. Our politics necessitate at least a nuanced word or two. Rape apology, especially when it comes to Black women, is anti-Black-feminist.
This is the game of double-dutch Black feminists are forced to play and have long played. We understand the force of neocoloniality and systemic and structural racism. We know the impact it’s had on Black communities and Black men. But we also know the inter- and intracommunal effects on our lives as well. Here’s the thing: It’s okay to appreciate and stand up for racial contributions while offering a critique of harm. This is not about telling Mallory what to say, a critique she’s made when pushed to offer a more unambiguous critique of Farrakhan – a critique that means to absolve her of providing said criticism. This is about the reality that patriarchy, sex, gender, and sexual oppression and violences are colonial artifacts, too, and how Black feminist politics and leadership demands we foreground not only the history and operation of the color-line but also how sex, sexual, gender, and class oppressions systematically shapes, limits, and denies our existence and thriving – regardless of the source, including our very own Black Moses. Especially, Black Moses.
As I watched Mallory forcefully and dynamically grace the airwaves last week, I grew frustrated where it seemed everyone else was applauding. I understood her unapologetic Blackness, Black feminism, and Black protectionism, well. I understood her love for the NOI and Black Moses. More, I understood our collective applause and how our systemic oppression and desires for not only racial unity and power but a Black Moses shaped it. At the same time, I recalled all the times that racial unity, while necessary and potentially liberating, called for our silence and third-classness, how resisting colonial artifacts meant protecting Black Moses at all cost, and how such protectionism meant also excusing intracommunal trauma. Black feminists can’t stand for Black life and Black inflicted trauma. Despite all of his good in Black communities, Farrakhan is on record supporting Black sexual and gender terrorists, rape culture, sexism, patriarchy, homophobia, and trans-antagonism. And no, it’s not enough to simply say we don’t agree with everything Farrakhan says. We can unequivocally note white terror and Black intracommunal oppression at the same time. Concomitantly, we can aspire to radical racial solidarity and accountability concurrently.
But be clear: this is bigger than Farrakhan. Farrakhan is a Black Moses figure, not the Black Moses figurehead. There have been many. The bottom line is this: the problem of the 21st century is still the color-line. However, the color-line is irreducible to equal access to cisgender heteropatriarchal Black manhood, ideas, needs, and accomplishments, and Black oppression can’t be totalized by the color-line. More, Black Moses devoid of Black radical inclusive politics, love, and a vision of intersectional Black diasporic liberative ethics, is ineffectual. And finally, Black Moses must be called out on his ish. Ultimately, we don’t need a cisgender heterosexual or singular Black Moses paradigm. Ella Baker explicitly warned against this. We need collective leadership inclusive of those from the furthest edges of the social margins who are willing to fight against the force of entwining Black oppressions. This doesn’t mean we don’t love and value cisgender heterosexual Black male leaders. Absolutely, we do. It means Black leadership must always be accountable to ALL Black people and as inclusive as our Black lives.
The problem of the 21st century are our interlocking Black oppressions.
Tamura Lomax received her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in Religion where she specialized in Black Religion and Black Diaspora Studies and developed expertise in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Black British and U.S. Black Cultural Studies. In 2018, Dr. Lomax published her first single authored monograph, Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture (Duke University Press). She also organized and guest edited the special issue, “Black Bodies in Ecstasy: Black Women, the Black Church, and the Politics of Pleasure” (Black Theology: An International Journal, Nov 2018). In 2017, Dr. Lomax curated #BlackSkinWhiteSin, a discourse on sex, violence, and the Black Church. In 2014, she published Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Cultural Productions(Palgrave Macmillan), a co-authored edited volume with Rhon S. Manigault-Bryant and Carol B. Duncan. She is currently at work on her latest book, Raising Non-Toxic Sons in White Supremacist America. She is the co-founder, CEO, and visionary of The Feminist Wire. For more or to conact, visit Bios.
I finished Episode 6 of #survivingrkelly executive produced by dream hampton late last night. Full disclosure: I am a Black woman sexual assault survivor who used to love me some R. Kelly, and yes, even after his marriage to 15-year-old Aaliyah. I knew it was wrong but quite frankly, like too many of us, I grew up knowing a lot of folks just like R. Kelly and Aaliyah. The solicitation, sexual and otherwise, of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen-year-old girls by nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one year-old-plus boys and men in Black communities was, unfortunately, the norm during my youth. And no, I don’t think any of us thought this was right. I do, however, believe many of us found it to be culturally permissible. There’s a difference. And no, this is not a Black problem. It’s a borderless cross-cultural problem. Grown men have long preyed on young girls across racial, ethnic, national, and socio-economic-political lines and many of us have looked the other way. Heck, it’s in the bible. How telling is that? If nothing else, it speaks to the normalization of predation.
That said, I loved me some R. Kelly up until at least his 2003 release of Chocolate Factory. And like many, I knew he was a sexual predator, but in my mind, I hadn’t yet processed that he was a sexual predator. Meaning that I’d heard about the sexual assault tape but was so deeply moved by his sound, his music, his performances, and yes, even his good looks, I compartmentalized the visual and aural aesthetics, which produced pleasure, and separated them from the larger narrative. Truth is, Chocolate Factory made me dance euphorically and forget about the ugliness of life. Music has a way of doing that. It makes you move your feet and wave your hands while forgetting about the sexism, patriarchy, exploitation, and misogynoir of your favorite artist. And so there I was, stepping in the name of love to the voice of a man that objectified and hated us.
Thank goodness, around this time I was also in graduate school. Not that you need graduate education to see what’s wrong with R. Kelly. But it was my engagement in this space with womanist and Black feminist textual resources that pushed me to become not solely a cultural participant, uncritically stepping in the name of faux love, but also and simultaneously a critical cultural reader. As I write in my latest book, Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture (2018), when engaging the text Black Women As Cultural Readers (1995), by Black feminist Jacqueline Bobo, “[She] asserts that cultural production requires critical readers. She articulates the work of the cultural reader, one that moves beyond audience member to critical spectator, as a strategic intervention in the politics of interpretation” (60). The cultural reader strategically intervenes in and on cultural production, while not only attending to how cultural production makes meaning, but also while taking seriously how we bond with cultural production – for good or bad — and how such cultural production works on us.
Today, I am a Black feminist historian, researcher, and writer who has written about Black women, sex, sexuality, sexual identity, representation, rape, and #rapeculture as these things relate to North American slavery, plantation life, and plantation sexual politics and ethics, as well as Black communities, families, contemporary Black popular culture, and the Black Church. I have been engaged in this work for the past 16 years, critically and strategically intervening on culture and meaning making as it relates to Black life, radical ethics, and liberation. I should say up front, it’s fine to consume and enjoy culture. And, I’d be lying if I said I only enjoyed the liberative parts. However, becoming a cultural reader meant critiquing the bad parts, even if I enjoyed them. It meant exploring why I loved the trashy parts of culture, how it worked on me and others, and what drew me (and us) to it. R. Kelly isn’t still signed to RCA because he’s no longer selling out venues or records. He’s still signed because people are still dancing, despite knowing what we know. Because he has a hardcore fanbase still brazenly bumping his music. A critical cultural reader doesn’t just dance, however, she asks “why?” The short answer is sexual predation is so normalized we sometimes think it’s better to keep dancing rather than ask the hard questions.
I am no longer an R. Kelly fan. And I certainly do not dance to his music. In fact, the sight and sound of him makes me sick, though I do at times miss the melodious beats – but not enough to betray my love and support for Black women and girls. As much as we may want to, we cannot parse R. Kelly from Robert or his music from his terrorism. They are ensnared. Each gives birth to and influences and enables the other. In fact, R. Kelly’s lyrics provide several clues to who Robert is. And the lyrics might be okay if he wasn’t talking about exploiting, objectifying, and dominating Black and Brown minors and/or grown women. “It Seems Like You’re Ready” and Aaliyah’s “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number” produced by R.Kelly, particularly when read together, tell us plenty. The question is, are we willing to critically listen? Robert has been telling us that age doesn’t matter and that our bodies are his playground for years. But just as he’s been grooming the women and girls in his stable to be his sexual playthings for decades, he’s been grooming us to shut up and keep dancing; to normalize predation. The question that comes to mind is this: Why have so many of us agreed to this? It’s not because we just love the music so much. I mean, maybe. But perhaps it’s because we too have been informed and impacted by predation. And this is what needs interrogating.
Let me make this plain: when we listen to, watch, or support R. Kelly, we are engaging with a misogynoirist terrorist who has a history of systemically capturing, exploiting, violating, and traumatizing Black girls and women. And we are not only helping to facilitate these efforts, we are emphatically endorsing them. It is up to us to choose against this; to resist and reject R. Kelly and the R. Kelly’s of the world rather than promote them. We are not powerless or unconscious cultural participants. We are not Pavlov’s dog. If R. Kelly’s victims were Black boys we would have stopped dancing decades ago. We wouldn’t dare blame the music, the artistry, or the so-called genius for still selling out his shows, buying his music, or caping for him. And we certainly wouldn’t attempt to make faux distinctions between the artist and the music. So then the question we must ask is this: Why are we okay with predatory practices when used against Black girls? Why do we look the other way when Black girls are violated? Why do we not care? Or worse, is it because we too violate and/or take pleasure in violating Black girls? How did this become our norm? And most importantly, how do we make it abnormal?
I’m partially deaf, so I chose to watch #survivingrkelly on my laptop, where I could not only deploy closed caption and more closely attend to language but also where I could rewind in order to do a close reading of body and other language. I was floored. Some of the details were already known. However, many were not. I’m not sure I was ready for the intricate layers provided in the stories or in the process of storytelling. I was overwhelmed by the courage of the Black women survivors. But I was also troubled by the desire for more and more details, and seemingly, the more explicit the better. At some points, the docuseries felt made for TV rather than made for their/our healing. The latter requires a critical balancing act, which includes a hefty dosage of Black feminist care, critique, analyses, and healing mechanisms. R. Kelly’s network of predators certainly needed a critical reading. Let them tell it, they were just doing their jobs when facilitating imprisonment, rape, and other “preferences.” I needed a visual, aural, mental, and emotional cleansing after watching their very triggering interviews. And it wasn’t just what was said, it was how they communicated what was said, it was tone, it was expression, it was the visual language of physical movement. I read not repentance but denial, negligence, brazenness, and at times, veiled enthusiasm.
As Angelica Jade Bastién writes in “Surviving R. Kelly Is a Necessary Awakening, But It Asks the Wrong Questions,”
“At what point does a documentary shift from honoring the voices of brutalized women to exploiting them for every salacious detail?”
“However, as Hampton and her team tease out the most stomach-churning details of these women’s experiences — their faces often streaked with tears and makeup — I realized it wasn’t the healing or reckoning they were interested in primarily, but the trauma.”
“But watching those testimonies, I often felt like I was stepping into a private moment, as the women pore over the details of what they experienced, the majority of whom were very young teenagers at the time of their abuse. Aesthetically, the documentary trades in the coarse rhythms of a tabloid.”
“Surviving R. Kelly is too interested in the particulars of what R. Kelly did to these women’s bodies to fully care about their humanity or grapple with the murky complexities of the bigger picture.”
This morning I awoke raw, angry, and sad. But as I commenced to doing my daily spiritual practice (and after several kisses to the face from the hubby), those feelings lessened, and I realized a few things. Namely, this kind of work requires aftercare, particularly healing rituals, continued education, and post-deconstructive work. But let’s first state the good: #survivingrkelly provides a contemporary mass-mediated televisual look at #rapeculture, and particularly as it impacts Black communities, and more specifically Black girls and women. More, it gives previous works and analyses a fresh, new lens as well as a particular gaze into the life and traumas of R. Kelly. That said, it does good and necessary, heart-wrenching and infuriating work. So I want to pause and give dream hampton and all others who worked on the series a full body bow for showing us, in a singular yet simultaneously collective story, not only how demonic R. Kelly is, but how #rapeculture works in real life with living and breathing examples. What is now undeniable, after watching this series, is that #rapeculture thrives due to #networksofpredation; systems and patterns of abuse; overlapping structures of oppression; failed social, political, religious, communal, and legal systems; and an overwhelming historical and contemporary disbelief of Black women’s and girls’ stories. The latter of whom, I argue in Jezebel Unhinged, are always already mis/read as sexually illicit, hyper, animalistic, immoral, and more. And this has everything to do with rape-ability.
But this is also what I wanted the series to contextualize, historicize, and problematize. To make it plain, R. Kelly could not become the monstrous sexual and otherwise abuser that he is without his #networkofpredators and #systemsofpredation, namely, his family, friends, managers, lawyers, the police, security, drivers, runners, flight purchasers, hotel bookers, phone answerers, marriage license forgers, music executives, RCA, business partners, fans, and the American judicial system. And while no one is guiltier than Robert, Robert can’t do what he does without his networks and resources. And he surely can’t enact decades of abuse towards Black women and girls without patterns of oppression and structural, institutional, and representational abuse and dehumanization already in place. For those asking how he’s gotten away with this, here is your answer. We have been taught that Black women and girls are unworthy of care, respect, autonomy, and safety — in history, in our music, on television, in film, in politics, in our faith traditions, in our communities, in our schools, in our criminal justice system, and in our homes. Now is the time for unlearning.
What’s clear to me is this: R. Kelly and his handlers – given the history of Black women and girls in America and his history of legal and cultural absolution – believe they have a right to own and abuse Black women and girls, and partially because America has said so. To them, R. Kelly’s behavior is normal and thus acceptable. It’s the rest of us critics who have a problem. In Jezebel Unhinged, I refer to this as the residue of plantation sexual politics. However, Robert and others have decided to take those politics and re-appropriate them; to possess them, if you will, for themselves. All of this in mind, Surviving R. Kelly is not a personal problem and/or story. It’s a historical, cultural, social, political, and a particular problem. And all of this needs analyzing and deconstructing. To this end, I suggest turning our attention, simultaneously, to some folk who’ve been doing this work for a very long time. And while the movement against sexual violence is over a century old and extends beyond Black women and girls, I’d like to place emphasis on the latter. Because if we look at the historical works of Black women movement workers and Black feminists and womanists who’ve been doing this work forever, we’ll see there’s a pattern of erasure, legally (see Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work noted below) and culturally (see Jezebel Unhinged), in terms of who is seen as justifiably rape-able and who isn’t and thus who gets justice and who doesn’t.
There are key national and international works/laborers that require naming and revisiting. I break them down by looking at testimonies, activists/organizers, researchers/writers, and the contemporary mass mediated iteration grounded in both social media and social movement. I call attention here because these works collectively tell us “why, Black girls and women.” They reveal why men like R. Kelly get away with abusing Black girls and women and not others. They interrogate how #networksofpredation come to be, get normalized, and continue to thrive. They provide a critical mirror for why some of us keep dancing. And more, they detail a lineage of abuses that help us make sense of and provide context for the current moment. Before 1960s/1970s social movements or 1990s/2000s media works (television, film, videos, social media, etc) against sexual violence, there were enslaved and newly freed Black women who resisted and called out rape. We can learn quite a bit from slave narratives and other primary sources, and not solely in terms of testimony but practices of healing, resistance, accountability, and justice.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs is a good start. The WPA and the Slave Narrative Collection, and specifically The American Slave collection, edited by George P. Rawick in 1977, are a good follow-up for primary sources. There’s also Recy Taylor’s story. On September 3, 1944, Taylor, of Henry County, Alabama, was abducted and gang-raped after leaving a church service by six white men who confessed to the crime to authorities but were subsequently never indicted or charged. The crime, though clearly not seen as a “real” crime to the justice system, was extensively covered in the Black press, however, and was an early catalyst, thanks to Rosa Parks’s work on the case, for the Civil Rights movement. These her-stories are important. Robert Kelly’s story of sexual abuse and lack of accountability did not begin in the millennium, with Aaliyah, with his sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl on video, or even with Robert himself. The American context has always been fertile for shameless sexual violence sans justice, particularly towards Black women and girls. Simultaneously, Black men (and many women) have to reckon with their participation.
All of this in mind, I also suggest the written works by Black feminists such as: The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970) by Toni Cade Bambara, “Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist” (1983) by Angela Y. Davis, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review, vol. 43, no. 6 (July 1991) by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (1994) by Darlene Clark-Hine, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997) by Saidiya Hartman, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (1998) by Tera Hunter, and At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (2011) by Danielle L. McGuire (not a Black feminist), just to name a few. Crenshaw literally provides the historical argument and grounding for Black women’s and girls’ legal erasure as victims in the American juridical system. I also write about this in Jezebel Unhinged.
In addition to first-hand testimony and Black feminist writers and researchers, there are media and movement works and workers that we need to be engaging. For example, Aishah Shahidah Simmons’s NO! The Rape Documentary (2006), which in many ways is the precursor for #survivingrkelly, Crenshaw’s #SayHerName and the African American Policy Forum, What About Our Daughters, founded in 2007 in response to an Oprah Winfrey show entitled “After Imus: Now What,” Scheherazade and Salamishah Tillet’s A Long Walk Home, The National Organization of Sisters of Color Ending Sexual Assault (SCESA), Black Women’s Blueprint, INCITE: Women and Trans People of Color Against Violence, Women of Color Network, and so on. #MeToo, founded by Tarana Burke, provides a new, mass-mediated, and undeniably necessary entry point and platform on the 100-plus year continuum of Black women’s resistances against sexual violence. We need ALL of these works and workers to be in conversation in order to move toward deconstruction and healing. The latter is where I feel #survivingrkelly ultimately falls short. Of course, no cultural production can do it all. Still, I found myself longing for next steps, more critical unapologetic Black feminist analysis, more historical grounding in terms of race, sex, and gender, and more balance between survivors’ testimonies and what at times felt like braggadocios pornotropic locker room tales of rape and cults of predation. To be sure, the deconstructive and healing archives are there for our taking.
Telling our stories is the first point of healing and resistance. But it’s not enough. And if we aren’t careful, such storytelling could become cheap entertainment or even pornographic. We need to be in conversation with the historical works of both tragedy and healing but also those individual and collective works and workers who engage the possibilities for socio-political-cultural-structural-institutional deconstruction, resistance, education, and accountability. We must engage and attempt to end the structures and politics that lead to and enable sexual dominance and violence. And such a lens must make central the place and role of patriarchy, sexism, toxic masculinity, and racism, and how each enable rape culture and specifically Black women’s and girls’ rape-ability. Such a discourse requires that we imagine, build, and demand structures, politics, and ethics of accountability in our day to day living; that we name and demolish not solely harmful individuals but institutions and institutional politics and networks.
Obviously, R. Kelly is a useful symbol of #rapeculture. However, #rapeculture is irreducible to R. Kelly. Also, the necessary and powerful #MeToo movement cannot and does not totalize the movement against #rapeculture and sexual violence. Identifying it as such limits the larger social movement against sexual violence to not only a singular set of aims (storytelling and Black girl joy) but a singular person. Truth is, we can’t get to joy without doing the critical work of structural, institutional, interpersonal, communal, and personal deconstruction and resistance. Meaning that this work is as local as our individual homes and communities and as broad as our racial and ethnic subgroups/ideas/values, our nation/state, our criminal justice systems and laws, and more. For example, in 2015, the Department of Justice reported that there was an average of 321,500 reported cases of sexual assault in a five-year period (2010-2015), averaging approximately one person every 98 seconds. It was estimated that only 15.5% to 30% of sexual assault cases are even reported. Unfortunately, those most likely to not report or to be ignored are the most vulnerable: women of color, in general, and Black women and girls, in particular. Rape is an epidemic; a social, cultural, and political problem.
And more, as we see with Recy Taylor’s story and with survivors of R. Kelly, prosecutors are less likely to pursue criminal charges against the assailant when the victim is Black, and jurors are less likely to believe a Black woman’s or girls’ account of sexual violence – if the case even makes it to court. More, police are less likely to take sex crimes seriously, especially when Black women and girls are involved. In 2000, the Philadelphia Inquirer exposed the Philadelphia’s Sex Crimes Unit (or “The Lying Bitches Unit” as former unit detective Roscoe Cofield termed it) for burying nearly 2,000 cases of assault on low-income Black women between 1995-2000. And not to mention, some of the most vicious, systemic, and violent abusers, assaulters, and rapists of Black women and girls have been police (and here and here). The contemporary state sanctioning of #rapeculture and more precisely, the seemingly state authorized rape and assault of Black women and girls requires a different sort of critical gaze — one that values storytelling but also requires structural analyses and forms of collective resistance.
Given these interlocking networks of predation, it is no wonder Robert was acquitted and continues to abuse Black women and girls. No wonder he pleaded not guilty (though he can be seen on that assault video tape plain as day) and continues to live his best life as a free man. No wonder he defiantly uses mechanisms of control seemingly taken straight out of Iceberg Slim’s rulebook for pimps right under our noses (without any sort of accountability or legal ramifications). For example, making his captors call him daddy; not allowing the girls and women to speak, look at him or others, eat, use the restroom, brush their teeth, or shower without his permission; locking them in rooms and cars for hours; cutting them off from their families; filming sex acts without their consent; introducing sex partners, underage and otherwise, and directing sexual encounters without consent; demanding a strict dress codes; forcing them to sign false self-incriminating letters and egregious contracts; and systematically using punishments like starvation, forcing them to face the wall, slapping them in the face, and maintaining no-eat lists for those who “disobey daddy,” etc. No wonder the juror in the docuseries laughed and smirked as he recounted not liking the way the witnesses and survivors dressed and looked and thus found them unbelievable and R. Kelly not guilty.
No wonder.
Yes, it’s because they are Black and America could give not one damn about Black women and girls or their right to sexual autonomy and safety, but it’s also because America is, at its core, shamelessly, unapologetically, and categorically a #rapeculture. Rape is the foundational glue to the #networkofpredation from which Robert rises and operates. And it’s not just America or the criminal justice system that keeps letting Robert off the hook. It’s all of us. It’s those still dancing to his music, buying his records, and attending his concerts. It’s parents who keep leaving their daughters in his care, hoping they will find money and stardom. It’s those who uncritically laugh and make jokes about his history of sexual abuse without any care for his victims. It’s those who continue to communicate to their children, loved ones, and social circles that he’s innocent. It’s Black collectives, communities, and institutions that keep him relevant and refuse to hold him accountable. One such example is the Black Church on the south-side of Chicago, who, after Robert’s arrest for child pornography in 2002, allowed him to do a sing along, hours after posting bail, with kindergarteners.
Be clear: this goes well beyond Robert Kelly. We cannot deconstruct #rapeculture or #networksofpredation by looking the other way, silence, ignorance, dismissal, making excuses, or by focusing solely on Robert. More, surviving is not enough. It’s a necessary start. We need education and non-negotiable politics of resistance – in our homes, in our schools, in our barbershops, in our beauty salons, in our religious communities, in our social organizations, and so on. So many Black girls and boys have stories that begin with them not having language for consent, not knowing how to say no, and learning sexual assault and abuse from a family member. And the history of Black hypersexualization and animalization does not help. At the same time, Black boys too often interpret manhood in terms of sexual conquest. And much too often Black girls interpret access to safety and sexual autonomy in terms of “proper womanhood” and not being hos, promiscuous, or fast. We know how the story goes with the latter. Fast girls don’t get raped because they are always asking for it. Their stories of violence are hardly ever believed. Times up for these labels functioning as tools of denial. We never call Black boys fast. Times up for reading Black sexual experiences and identities through these lenses. Times up for rape (and avoiding rape) serving as the subtext for coming of age in America.
Healing requires accessible and mass-mediated frameworks for deconstruction and resistance, from multiple angles, and more, ground rules for believing Black women and girls (and boys) and understanding that bodily autonomy is a right. Systematized #networksofpredation will continue to breed and thrive otherwise. And R. Kelly and the R. Kellys of the world will continue to terrorize and exploit Black women and girls, thanks to the normalizing of said systems and networks. We will continue to confuse the lines between what is right and what has been culturally permissible. And we will carry on with false dichotomies between entertainment and real lived violence (R. Kelly v. Robert). And more, we will continue stepping in the name of faux love as Robert and the R. Kellys of the world violently play on this bridge called our backs. It’s time for our unlearning, and for not only calling out those who ultimately say, through their actions and words, #rapeculture is okay, violating Black women and girls is okay, predation is okay, and grown adult sexual interest in children is permissible, but dragging them and their systems of predation for dear life, and making them perverse and therefore intolerable, regardless of how they make us feel, dance, or wave our hands.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been revised from an earlier version to further engage select themes.
Tamura Lomax received her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in Religion where she specialized in Black Religion and Black Diaspora Studies and developed expertise in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Black British and U.S. Black Cultural Studies. In 2018, Dr. Lomax published her first single authored monograph, Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture (Duke University Press). She also organized and guest edited the special issue, “Black Bodies in Ecstasy: Black Women, the Black Church, and the Politics of Pleasure” (Black Theology: An International Journal, Nov 2018). In 2017, Dr. Lomax curated #BlackSkinWhiteSin, a discourse on sex, violence, and the Black Church. In 2014, she published Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Cultural Productions (Palgrave Macmillan), a co-authored edited volume with Rhon S. Manigault-Bryant and Carol B. Duncan. She is currently at work on her latest book, Raising Non-Toxic Sons in White Supremacist America. She is the co-founder, CEO, and visionary of The Feminist Wire. For more or to conact, visit Bios.
We, The Damned Collective, are delighted to host the work of The Damned. Below you will read a collective statement from The Damned Collective to/with/for The Damned. We ask that you read this seriously. Will you make Commitment to/with/for The Damned? We honor these words. We give gratitude for the gift of the Black Radical Tradition. #doitfortheDAMNED #doitfortheDAMMM
To radical scholars. To scholars who believe in freedom and cannot rest until it comes. To tenured and untenured faculty. To undergraduate and graduate students. To college dropouts. To organic intellectuals. To lecturers. To organizers. To poets. To artists. To people who love the PEOPLE. To those who are about the business of liberation in this world, this time. To people we have yet to name, but know. We ask you:
Over the last two weeks, you have been presented with some urgent essays, composed under the banner of The Damned, an homage to the 1973 text, Lessons From the Damned: Class Struggles in the Black Community, written by the Black Feminist Collective, The Damned.
In the Introduction to the second edition, the authors write:
Lessons from the Damned was the beginning of our learning how to survive in this system. We were learning that what you don’t know will kill you. It was our self-consciousness that turned our ‘stupid’ self-destruction toward the real enemy. The fact that it would be read by others gave us inner peace and self-worth. That’s the power people like us never know because capitalism reflects us a worthless…We transformed together… (The Damned, 1973)
Today, we write to ask you to take/be part of our necessary for now collective transformation. This ask is not new (even if it may be new for you); we acknowledge the work of Black feminists, women of color feminists, trans men and women, queer, and other radical ancestors and present-day co-conspirators and agitators. We are EVERYWHERE–from Mississippi to Brazil–wherever YOU are right now. We are guided by Audre Lorde’s reminder, “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.” We are attempting to build bridges here so that we may find our way from our often isolating and precarious positions within the academy, back to ourselves and back to WE radical love.
And we are cautioned by Black Feminist scholar Jennifer Nash when she writes, “Love, of course, is not wholly unproblematic political terrain: it can be deployed to shore up heteronormativity, to re-energize dominant narratives of romance, and to advance claims to power.” She goes on to state,
Although affect theory and queer theory are inextricably intertwined, the labor of constructing political communities around ‘public feelings’ and ‘communal affect’ has been a black feminist investment for decades…Indeed, black feminism’s visionary love-politics effectively and hopefully uses a refrain like ‘where is the love?’ and transforms it from a personal question about romantic love into a political call for transcending the self and transforming the public sphere. (Jennifer C. Nash, “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality”)
We aim to pursue and achieve this radical love-ethic through a commitment to, with, and for The Damned Collective. We offer this collective endeavor so that we can get to know better our collective and individual dreams. How have our individual and collective selves been crushed under the weight of this thing called The ACADEMY? Even in its most radical manifestations, people like us and not like us are harmed. People like us and not like us harm. We have to remember that it is okay for us to want something else, something beyond the binaristic options the Western Academy provides. So we ask that you read, share, and talk with others about this pledge. If it resonates with you, take this pledge for yourself.
Before making this commitment to/with/for The Damned Collective, appreciate yourself and the collective network potential. Choose a medium to “R&R”: Record and Reflect. Allow yourself to FEEL, HEAL, and be REAL.
We acknowledge and honor who WE are, the power that WE have in this moment. A commitment to The Damned is a commitment to yourself that names only one of our many current conditions. So we call ourselves The Damned in 2018 and in 1973, but we might use other names in the future. There are indeed other names circulating right now for this collective of people and the WERQ WE be doing: Emergent Strategy, Black Queer Feminism, Generative Somatics, Love with Accountability, Southerners on New Ground,and a Mobile Homecoming for the GAWDS!
WE come in many ways and our names may change, but we remain committed always to the work. We will not let names limit our capacity for being and becoming anew. The names we carry allow us to expand in our consciousness and in our radical praxis of LOVE. We carry with us the names of Harriet Tubman, The Combahee River Collective, The Crunk Feminist Collective, Assata Shakur, Ella Baker, Essex Hemphill, Blake Brockington and all of the future generations who have yet to have the space to name themselves.
In the words of The Mandate written by Mary Hooks: “The mandate for Black people in this time!/ Is to avenge the suffering of our ancestors!/ To earn the respect of future generations!/ And be willing to be transformed in the service of the work!”
Are Y’all willing to be transformed in the service of the WERQ?
Take a pledge for yourself and with your fellow Damned!
#doitfortheDAMNED #doitfortheDAMMM
The Damned Collective (2018), is a collective and an organizing strategy working to combat the isolationists tactics of the University structure that prevents people who believe in transformation and freedom from getting to know themselves and each other differently, al(l)ways. The University extracts both our intellectual and emotional labor. We organize here on behalf of our emotional labor, which is constantly being extracted violently through a kind of identity politics. You will hear more from The Damned (2018) in January 2019!
In the meantime, check out the pieces that have been published in the last few weeks in solidarity with The Damned Collective (2018)
Don’t forget to take a moment to read the pledge and sign on!
#doitfortheDAMNED #doitfortheDAMMM
You can find more about us/WE here:
Email: [email protected]
IG: The Damned (damned.the)
Twitter: The Damned (@TheDamned13)
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