April 15, 2024 • 28 mins
Jenn M. Jackson returns to celebrate the publication of their new book, Black Women Taught Us. Together with Danielle, they talk about recognizing "crooked rooms" and how love with no accountability is a form of abuse.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Good morning, peeps, and welcome to wok F Daily with
Meet Your Girl Danielle Moody. Recording from the Home Bunker, Folks,
I am very excited about today's episode. It is with
a friend of the show that I'm excited to bring
back and introduce new book Black Women Taught Us An
(00:33):
Intimate History of Black Feminism by doctor Jen M. Jackson.
And in this conversation, Jen and I get into, you know,
the history of Black women, of black influence, of the
(00:54):
racism and massage noir that we have seen as of
late in the media, and just talk about the importance
of books like theirs that really goes far in terms
of lifting up the illuminating figures within black feminism that
(01:21):
have shaped this country. We talk about the difference right
between quote feminism and black feminism. We dig into the
Black liberation movement and discuss the real importance of understanding
(01:43):
the nuances that have always been at play, the tightrope
that black women have always had to walk in our
society and continue to do so. And you know, I
enjoy I always enjoy a time that I get the
opportunity to speak with Jen, because they bring this country.
(02:07):
It's racism it's misogyny, it's transphobia, it's homophobia to task
all the time, and I deeply appreciate it. So I
hope that you all enjoy the conversation with doctor M.
Jackson on their new book, Black Women Taught Us, An
(02:28):
Intimate History of Black Feminism. It is out now, folks.
I am very excited to welcome back to OKF Daily.
It's been a long time. Actually, yeah right, it's been
a long time doctor Jen M. Jackson, who is an
(02:49):
assistant professor at Syracuse University in the Department of Political Science,
and the new author. I want to just give a
round of applause, new author of the book Black Women
Taught Us, which is a portrait of I think black
women who some we know, some we don't know. At
(03:10):
a time Jen where I think that in so many ways,
we are seeing black women in all of these different positions.
Whether you're looking at Fawnie Willison, Georgie, You're looking at
Tish James, You're looking at you know, Angel Reese, You're
looking at all of these different black women that are
(03:30):
in the spotlight, and we're watching the way that a
lot has changed and a lot hasn't in terms of
what we see, expect, want and demand from black women
to talk to us about this book and just loving
the title, love the cover black women taught us, tell
(03:51):
us about it and the why behind it for you.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Thank you so much for that background introduction. I can't
take very much credit for the cover except that I did.
I did indicate to the team at Penguin that I
wanted a black woman designer to be behind the design.
So this is from Her name is Ziah Gordon and
she's on Instagram as careful Black Girl and girl spelled GRL.
(04:19):
She's an incredible designer and very attentive to guidance. So
this book, you know, it is so important to me
because when I conceived of writing it, I was it
was just before COVID nineteen started to spike in twenty twenty,
and I was coming out of graduate school and I
was thinking, you know, what book do I even have
in me to write? And you know, this was the
(04:42):
time when so many books were really being written to
white women about black folk, and I just didn't want
to participate in that process. So this book is actually
based on a course that I teach at Syracuse University
of the Young People to undergrads and graduate students, and
it's a kind of archive and anthology of my own
(05:04):
black feminist journey and all the bumps along the way,
the self discovery, the process of understanding my own queerness,
and how black feminist literature and their lives taught me
so much about that. Right. So I start the book
off actually not talking about any of the women on
the cover. I started the book off talking about my mother.
(05:24):
And it starts off at a choir rehearsal that took
place in my house every Wednesday. My mom is a singer,
and all my aunts are singers and very religious people,
so it was gospel music and they always came on
Wednesdays and had these choir rehearsals. And this was my
time to spend all this additional time with older women,
older Black women who saw me and wanted to participate
(05:49):
in the process of raising me, of ensuring my survival.
And I tell about my Auntie Barbara, who taught me
how to make sure the chicken was cooked all the
way through. She was like, okay, baby, that chicken is bleeding.
You got to poke it with a fork, you know.
And these little lessons I got from my auntie Donna Fey,
who never wanted me to go outside without ear rings on,
(06:10):
you know. So like these things and these women were
not actually blood little things, you know, they were what
we call fictive kin you know. So this book is
really an ode to as much to the Addo Lords
and the Tony Morrison's and the I. W. Wells Is
as they are to the Auntie Donna Fese, the Auntie
Barbera's and my mother Cynthia, and my grandmother Lucia and
my grandmother Clara, right, they're meant to. This book is
(06:32):
meant to be a sequence of love stories, of love
letters to the women who were invested in my futurity,
who were invested in seeing me survive. And I think
that's inherently what black feminism is about, right, about ensuring
black folks' survival. And unfortunately black women have had to
do that work for so long, and they've done it
(06:54):
mostly thankless, right, And so this book is also to
say thank you for your work that is too often overlooked.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Tell us why there is, I guess, an important distinction
between black feminists ideology and white feminism. Why that distinction
and the literature and the ideology is so distinctly different
and needs to be taught and expressed in that way.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Yeah. So this is an important question because a lot
of people don't understand that feminism, mainstream feminism started at
the same time as black feminism really got its start.
People think that black feminism is kind of new, but
in actuality, the first wave of what we call now
mainstream white feminism started with white women who in the
(07:51):
nineteenth and twentieth centuries were thinking about their relationship to
their husbands. They were thinking about the fact that they
would say they felt owned by their husbands. Meanwhile, those
same women owned black women, right, And they weren't thinking
about the fact that as they were thinking of womanhood
and of feminism and of their own rights, they weren't
(08:13):
thinking about the rights of the women who were working
in their households. Right. And so mainstream white feminism, that
first wave, the Simone de Bouvier's of the world, the
Mary Wollston Crafts of the world, were not thinking about
race at all. They were just thinking about their orientation
to white men, right. So what happens here is that
(08:37):
what people overlook is that people like and Aulia Cooper
were writing in eighteen ninety two books like A Voice
from the South and A Voice from the South is
really thinking about what it means to be a black
woman in black churches in the South, where they're facing lynching.
It's the post slavery moment, the post emancipation moment. What
does it mean to be free now? Right? I to
(08:59):
be well? Right? Southern horrors in eighteen ninety two as well.
So at the same time that white women are thinking
about being owned by white men, black women are thinking
about what it means to be oppressed by everyone else, right,
And so feminism ends up being associated with those white women.
(09:19):
That first wave is that kind of moment of their
self realization that we don't belong to these men. The
second wave actually emerges during the Civil Rights era, which
is kind of funny because black women are obviously thinking
about race once again, but white women are thinking about labor.
They're thinking about what it means to work outside the home. Right.
(09:39):
They have now been faced with the Great Depression, They're
now faced with men who are having to leave for
multiple wars, and they're thinking about what it means to
use their labor to help promote the household. What does
it mean to be a respectable wife who has meat
loaf waiting on the stove when everybody gets home. But
now you need two incomes maybe to keep that house
(10:00):
hold going right. Meanwhile, black women are trying to survive
and get the right to vote in nineteen twenty. We
know that women got the right to vote codified in
the nineteenth Amendment, But what we rarely talk about is
that it took until the voting rights back in nineteen
sixty five for black folks to actually have the legitimate
(10:23):
right to vote. Right to tear down all of these
kind of grandfather clauses and various laws that kept them
from the poles. So what you see here is another
dissonance between what white women's concerns are and the lived
experiences of black women. And as the third wave of
e merges in the seventies and eighties, white women are
thinking about reproduction, their bodily justice, what it means to
(10:48):
live freely in their skin. They're taking off their braws,
they're burning bras and things like this. But this is
the Black power moment, right This is when black women
all over the country are trying to fgure out what
it means for us to have rights against a carceral state.
This at the same time that the war on drugs
is increasing, and there's a huge epidemic across the north
(11:10):
of the A's and HIV crisis, right, And so black
women are thinking, what does it mean for us to
live in community with folks who are not thinking about
our concerns? Right, So there's always been this disconnect between
white women's kind of mainstream feminist concerns and the lived
experiences of black women. Right. So black feminism has endured
(11:35):
all this time. Right, people for some reason associated with
the coining of intersectionality in nineteen eighty nine and nineteen
ninety one, but in actuality, intersectionality was a concept before
it was a theoretical term, right, people were thinking. Anela
Cooper was thinking about intersectionality when she wrote A Boye
from the South. Id B. Wells wrote in Southern Horrors
(11:58):
about the ways that little black girls were sexually assaulted
but there was no punishment for their aggressors because they
were both black and girl. Right, So she was already
thinking about those intersections of identity. So all this time
we have been having a kind of intersectional feminist conversation
in Black feminist circles. It's just been overlooked by the
(12:20):
mainstream movement. And unfortunately that is part and parcel with
mainstream white feminism that it typically just associates itself with
the concerns of white women trying to be more like
or closer to white men, but not really being in
coalition with and in solidarity with black women. Jenn, let me.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Ask you this too. Thank you for that, because I mean,
it's like you just gave us a brief insight into
what I would imagine a one oh one and a
one oh two class withmen the like talk by you
tell me where you see or where you have found
black queerness inside of black feminism, and how you articulate
(13:07):
that inside of your book, how you have articulated that
inside of the teachings and the learnings right that you
both provide and have experience through your life.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I always say, I've
always been a young, like black queer girl from Oakland, Right.
I think my mother very much clocked me as a child, right,
She would put me in stockings and dresses and all
these kind of girly things, and I was just I
was propelled by it, and I was six foot four
(13:40):
by the time I was twelve years old, and I
played sports and I was always leaned masculine, so I
was a very gender queer teenager. My favorite shoe was Jordan's.
To my sixth grade graduation, I wore stockings, a leather vest,
a colored white shirt, a black skirt with slits up
the side, and on bat boots, you know. So it
(14:02):
was always yeah, and I was class president. So I
walked on stage and gave a speech in that outfit.
You know, I've always been this person, you know, I've
always been this queer girl, and I was so I
was so blessed and so lucky that my mother, who
was not tall, I'm the only tall woman in my family.
(14:24):
And they were all kind of like, we don't know
what to do with you up there, right, But my
mother and my grandmother's were very adamant about me loving
myself and me being fully in my body and being
proud of who I am and who I was, And
so my mom would always say, like, you keep your
head up, you never look down, you never hunt your shoulders,
(14:45):
you never you never shrink for people. You know, body,
you stand upright in your skin. And even when I
felt small on the inside, or when I was hiding
my gender and sexuality, when I was hiding my desires
because in a religious family, I couldn't say, hey, I
like girls, right, it was hard to express that, and
(15:07):
it slipped out from time to time. When I was eleven,
I combed my hair up into a high top faith
and I walked into my mom's bedroom. I said, Mom,
a boy, and she said, girl, if you don't get
out my bedroom, I am watching a movie, I'm not
you know, you know. And we never talked about it again,
but it was one of those She wasn't upset with me.
(15:27):
She was just like, don't interrupt my movie, you know.
And I think in a lot of respects my mother
allowing me to explore myself, you know, as I wished,
was how my queerness showed up, you know, And that's
how it shows up in the book. Right. So in
the book, I talk a lot about these moments where
(15:50):
I was discovering and this is this is gonna sound weird,
just I'm just gonna and say it. I didn't actually
really understand that I was gay until I was much
much older. And when I say much much older, I'm
I mean like in my thirties, mainly because in Oakland,
like everyone's like a little bit gay, right, So, like
Oakland is a very queer place. Berkeley is a very
(16:11):
queer place. It's a place where there's a lot of hippies, right,
And I felt like we were all doing a little
bit of queer shit. I was like, Oh, y'all like girls, right,
everybody likes everybody, you know. So for me, growing up
in California, in Oakland and Berkeley, in the Bay Area
in the eighties and nineties, being ginger queer wasn't weird.
We had a cross dressing day at my high school
(16:31):
and it was my favorite theme day. It was my
favorite theme day. I dressed like a boy, I painted
on a mustache, I got all my and the girls
flirted with me all day. I was like, this is amazing.
It was my favorite day. And no one thought it
was weird that we all would cross dress. The boys
would do it, everyone would cross dress. And as I
(16:52):
got older, I realized, oh, that's very that's very progressive, right,
that's even the teacherss would do it. I had a
a French teacher. He was a teacher in biology, but
he was a french Man and he had a full
hairy chest, and he would come to school in lingerie,
women's lingerie, you know, and he would just walk around
all day and women's lingerie, you know, and we were like,
(17:13):
this is fine. It said, Lacurt, you wear your lingerie.
And this was a big man, okay, my size and buff.
So you know, these things I think made queerness so
natural to me that it didn't stand out until I
left home. Right when I left home and people were like,
why are you like that? Like what's and I was like,
(17:35):
what do you mean? And it started to cast a
light on the queer ways of being that had already
been acceptable and kind of that's who I was. And
that was when I turned to black feminism to be
like why why does everyone think I'm so weird? Like
why am I having such a hard time fitting in
in these spaces? Right? And that's the cricket room that
(17:56):
most of Harris Perry talks about, and I talk about
it in the introduction chapter where we're walking around, right
and we're trying to we're trying to fit in this
space and we think we're off right, but in actuality,
the room is crazy. The room is asking us to
behave in certain ways right that are not natural to
our bodies. And so we're trying to stand up right,
(18:18):
we're trying to fit and the room is just not
the room we should be in, right. And it took
me years and years and years to realize that, in
this queer body, I needed to just stand upright and
walk out of that room. And for so long I
was trying to fit myself and fit myself and fit myself.
And so this book is really also a kind of
coming of age story of me walking through that journey
(18:41):
and understanding I don't have to fit myself into those rooms.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
I think the beauty of this book, but also of
your own intertwining story is like the courage that it
takes to say, as black women, as black people, this
room ain't right, it's not me right, and I'm going
to walk out of it right, and I'm going to
(19:05):
walk into and create something else right, because I think
that it has always been that the one size fits
all mentality of this country, right, which is that everybody
that comes here or is brought here, is forced here,
is forced to assimilate into some watered down, meek, small,
(19:29):
you know, docile version of who they actually are. And
I think that you know what your book, as you say,
your love letter, you know Black women taught us is
like no, you can leave that room. That room isn't
for you, Like that room isn't for you. And I
love that. With a few minutes that we have left,
(19:52):
I want to talk about what we have seen recently
in culture come across our screens. With most recently, I
want to talk about Amanda Seals first, a comedian actress
who was it like a couple of weeks ago op
ed written about her and the fact that she is
(20:15):
not palpable in some black spaces and for some black people.
I mean, I don't know what else to say. I
don't know what other word to use, but she has
called out the black establishment, whether it's in media and Hollywood,
in this or that has a very acidic and this
is coming from me. This is coming from me who
says a lot of hot shit but has a very
(20:37):
acidic tongue when when talking about black people experience this
is that and the other thing, and gen people are
coming for her. They are coming for her, to the
point where I just saw on social media doctor Mark
lamon Hill coming out and saying, you know, the media,
a pylon that is happening around Amanda Seals is now
(21:00):
write and like, you know, I support her, blah blah,
make it make sense about what is happening in this universe.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
So you know what, you know what this is the thing.
I made a post about this on Instagram and people
were upset because there is okay, So there's two parts
to this, which I think that people have to understand.
We don't have to choose sides. Right. There are the
people who say we should love one another, we should
offer grace to black women. This is you know, the
original piece was in essence and they're like, this is
a publication that's meant to uplift black women. How could
(21:32):
you all write this? So I understand that, right. There's
other side, which is kind of where I started off,
which is like, yeah, but people don't like her, right,
and that's okay, right. We don't have to like everyone, right.
There are plenty of people in academia, in publishing, in
entertainment who I don't personally like, right, and that don't
(21:53):
personally like me, and that's okay, right, And that was
kind of where my stance was. Now I'm in a
different place, and I'm in a place because I watched
a video of hers on Twitter where she was like
yelling like this is enough, enough is enough. I don't
know you people, And what I honestly want to say
about this is that grace is so important and accountability
(22:16):
is just as important. Right. And if people over the
years have come to you and said, we really don't
appreciate how you talk about poor black folks and these
nikes and Jordan's suits tracksuits or whatever, and passports, we
really didn't enjoy when you were defending Sean King. We
(22:39):
really felt a way when you were saying that Charlemagne
is your friend. These things hurt us because we like
you and we want better for you. Right. That What
people don't understand is that that is love. Right, Because
if people don't call you in, if people don't say
anything to you at all, that means they could care
(23:00):
less what you do or say. It's like you walk
outside with a booker in your nose and your friend
nless you get into a front of a room of
people with a booker hang out your nose or suspinaging
your teeth, right, that's not your friend. Right. But we
have been a friend to Amanda, and we have said
we don't like these things, and we expect more of you.
You only expect more of people who you believe have
(23:23):
the capacities do better. And unfortunately, each time that folks
have come to Amanda and said, hey, we really want
you to do better, Amanda has said, I don't care
what y'all think. Okay, yeah, and yeah, she doubles down,
she will go and do an interview about it, and
(23:44):
triple down. She'll never apologize. I don't think I've actually
even heard her say I'm sorry for saying these things
that might have hurt poor black folks or whatever it
might be. She doesn't. She does not hold herself accountable right,
and it's not clear who she is accountable to, right.
So the work the people always think about, I love
(24:05):
black people, and I love black people, and I love
black people, but if you love someone, you have to
be accountable to them. Love without accountability is abused. That's
all it is. That Bell Hooks taught us this. Okay,
love with no accountability is a form of abuse. And
(24:25):
unfortunately a lot of people who have promoted her been
behind her, followed her, told everyone about her, thought she
was great now feel disrespected, disposed of, and abused by her.
And I can't count myself in that because I released
(24:46):
her quite some time ago when she was doing the
whole anti black passport thing. That's a line for me.
I came from a place where that's the trigger for me. Also,
Jordan's is my favorite shoot, and I'm never gonna stop
buy at them. I didn't get a passport until I
was thirty two years old, but I had about over
two dozen pairs of Jordan's before then. You know why,
because I needed to have shoes on my feet. Right.
This is the language of people who use welfare policy
(25:09):
to ensure that folks don't have enough food to feed themselves.
It's the same language. It's the same dog whistley, right,
And so when people call her in, she has to
be able to listen and to hold that calling in
and to be accountable to them, because if she's not accountable,
this will continue happening. This is how it works, right.
(25:31):
And I can say this again, like you said, you
say some hot shit, I say some hot shit, right.
But if somebody comes to me and say, Jim, that
was a miss, I'm ana listen. I'll listen there's.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Something exactly yeah right, yeah, right.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
There's something I say. I say what I said right
if it's reasoned right, if it's reasoned right, but if
it hurts black folk, absolutely not. I I have a duty,
in my opinion, to stand in the gap for all
black people, no matter what they come from, no matter
who they are, And that is something that is at
the center of my work, and it's just not clear
(26:06):
to a lot of people who was at the center
of Amanda's work at this point.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Thank you for that. You were one of the first
people that I text, you know when the Essence story broke,
because I had seen your posts and I was just like,
you know, because I am a person who will also
like hold myself to account. Did I go too far?
Did I say too much?
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Like what?
Speaker 1 (26:32):
And that is this the truth? Like all of those things,
Like as a person with a public platform, you know,
there is accountability and responsibility that comes with that. And
I'm just like, oh, am I treating her too harshly?
Am I criticizing her too much? Right? Because pop culture
is not is not my lane. But when I see
people who are in Hollywood then move into political spaces,
(26:57):
but then do so with a white so premise tint
in their lens and language. Then like, I do feel
like there that is the space for me to say,
you know, like who is for? Like who is your
who is your audience? And like what is what is
the center? And what is the purpose that you were
moving from the space that you're moving from is it
(27:20):
of purpose outside of yourself? And so I think that
those distinctions are really important. And so I just I
thank you for breaking that down. I am so excited
for you. I am so excited for this book, folks.
It is out now. Black women taught us. Go get it,
buy it for yourself, buy it for a friend.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
You know.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
It is beautiful, it is brilliant, and I just I
thank you so much for making the time for us
here at will kay Affen on your tour de force.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
I appreciate it anytime, anytime for you. I love it here.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
That is it for me today, dear friends, on woke
a f as always Power to the people and to
all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.
Good morning, peeps, and welcome to wok F Daily with
Meet Your Girl Danielle Moody. Recording from the Home Bunker, Folks,
I am very excited about today's episode. It is with
a friend of the show that I'm excited to bring
back and introduce new book Black Women Taught Us An
(00:33):
Intimate History of Black Feminism by doctor Jen M. Jackson.
And in this conversation, Jen and I get into, you know,
the history of Black women, of black influence, of the
(00:54):
racism and massage noir that we have seen as of
late in the media, and just talk about the importance
of books like theirs that really goes far in terms
of lifting up the illuminating figures within black feminism that
(01:21):
have shaped this country. We talk about the difference right
between quote feminism and black feminism. We dig into the
Black liberation movement and discuss the real importance of understanding
(01:43):
the nuances that have always been at play, the tightrope
that black women have always had to walk in our
society and continue to do so. And you know, I
enjoy I always enjoy a time that I get the
opportunity to speak with Jen, because they bring this country.
(02:07):
It's racism it's misogyny, it's transphobia, it's homophobia to task
all the time, and I deeply appreciate it. So I
hope that you all enjoy the conversation with doctor M.
Jackson on their new book, Black Women Taught Us, An
(02:28):
Intimate History of Black Feminism. It is out now, folks.
I am very excited to welcome back to OKF Daily.
It's been a long time. Actually, yeah right, it's been
a long time doctor Jen M. Jackson, who is an
(02:49):
assistant professor at Syracuse University in the Department of Political Science,
and the new author. I want to just give a
round of applause, new author of the book Black Women
Taught Us, which is a portrait of I think black
women who some we know, some we don't know. At
(03:10):
a time Jen where I think that in so many ways,
we are seeing black women in all of these different positions.
Whether you're looking at Fawnie Willison, Georgie, You're looking at
Tish James, You're looking at you know, Angel Reese, You're
looking at all of these different black women that are
(03:30):
in the spotlight, and we're watching the way that a
lot has changed and a lot hasn't in terms of
what we see, expect, want and demand from black women
to talk to us about this book and just loving
the title, love the cover black women taught us, tell
(03:51):
us about it and the why behind it for you.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Thank you so much for that background introduction. I can't
take very much credit for the cover except that I did.
I did indicate to the team at Penguin that I
wanted a black woman designer to be behind the design.
So this is from Her name is Ziah Gordon and
she's on Instagram as careful Black Girl and girl spelled GRL.
(04:19):
She's an incredible designer and very attentive to guidance. So
this book, you know, it is so important to me
because when I conceived of writing it, I was it
was just before COVID nineteen started to spike in twenty twenty,
and I was coming out of graduate school and I
was thinking, you know, what book do I even have
in me to write? And you know, this was the
(04:42):
time when so many books were really being written to
white women about black folk, and I just didn't want
to participate in that process. So this book is actually
based on a course that I teach at Syracuse University
of the Young People to undergrads and graduate students, and
it's a kind of archive and anthology of my own
(05:04):
black feminist journey and all the bumps along the way,
the self discovery, the process of understanding my own queerness,
and how black feminist literature and their lives taught me
so much about that. Right. So I start the book
off actually not talking about any of the women on
the cover. I started the book off talking about my mother.
(05:24):
And it starts off at a choir rehearsal that took
place in my house every Wednesday. My mom is a singer,
and all my aunts are singers and very religious people,
so it was gospel music and they always came on
Wednesdays and had these choir rehearsals. And this was my
time to spend all this additional time with older women,
older Black women who saw me and wanted to participate
(05:49):
in the process of raising me, of ensuring my survival.
And I tell about my Auntie Barbara, who taught me
how to make sure the chicken was cooked all the
way through. She was like, okay, baby, that chicken is bleeding.
You got to poke it with a fork, you know.
And these little lessons I got from my auntie Donna Fey,
who never wanted me to go outside without ear rings on,
(06:10):
you know. So like these things and these women were
not actually blood little things, you know, they were what
we call fictive kin you know. So this book is
really an ode to as much to the Addo Lords
and the Tony Morrison's and the I. W. Wells Is
as they are to the Auntie Donna Fese, the Auntie
Barbera's and my mother Cynthia, and my grandmother Lucia and
my grandmother Clara, right, they're meant to. This book is
(06:32):
meant to be a sequence of love stories, of love
letters to the women who were invested in my futurity,
who were invested in seeing me survive. And I think
that's inherently what black feminism is about, right, about ensuring
black folks' survival. And unfortunately black women have had to
do that work for so long, and they've done it
(06:54):
mostly thankless, right, And so this book is also to
say thank you for your work that is too often overlooked.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Tell us why there is, I guess, an important distinction
between black feminists ideology and white feminism. Why that distinction
and the literature and the ideology is so distinctly different
and needs to be taught and expressed in that way.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Yeah. So this is an important question because a lot
of people don't understand that feminism, mainstream feminism started at
the same time as black feminism really got its start.
People think that black feminism is kind of new, but
in actuality, the first wave of what we call now
mainstream white feminism started with white women who in the
(07:51):
nineteenth and twentieth centuries were thinking about their relationship to
their husbands. They were thinking about the fact that they
would say they felt owned by their husbands. Meanwhile, those
same women owned black women, right, And they weren't thinking
about the fact that as they were thinking of womanhood
and of feminism and of their own rights, they weren't
(08:13):
thinking about the rights of the women who were working
in their households. Right. And so mainstream white feminism, that
first wave, the Simone de Bouvier's of the world, the
Mary Wollston Crafts of the world, were not thinking about
race at all. They were just thinking about their orientation
to white men, right. So what happens here is that
(08:37):
what people overlook is that people like and Aulia Cooper
were writing in eighteen ninety two books like A Voice
from the South and A Voice from the South is
really thinking about what it means to be a black
woman in black churches in the South, where they're facing lynching.
It's the post slavery moment, the post emancipation moment. What
does it mean to be free now? Right? I to
(08:59):
be well? Right? Southern horrors in eighteen ninety two as well.
So at the same time that white women are thinking
about being owned by white men, black women are thinking
about what it means to be oppressed by everyone else, right,
And so feminism ends up being associated with those white women.
(09:19):
That first wave is that kind of moment of their
self realization that we don't belong to these men. The
second wave actually emerges during the Civil Rights era, which
is kind of funny because black women are obviously thinking
about race once again, but white women are thinking about labor.
They're thinking about what it means to work outside the home. Right.
(09:39):
They have now been faced with the Great Depression, They're
now faced with men who are having to leave for
multiple wars, and they're thinking about what it means to
use their labor to help promote the household. What does
it mean to be a respectable wife who has meat
loaf waiting on the stove when everybody gets home. But
now you need two incomes maybe to keep that house
(10:00):
hold going right. Meanwhile, black women are trying to survive
and get the right to vote in nineteen twenty. We
know that women got the right to vote codified in
the nineteenth Amendment, But what we rarely talk about is
that it took until the voting rights back in nineteen
sixty five for black folks to actually have the legitimate
(10:23):
right to vote. Right to tear down all of these
kind of grandfather clauses and various laws that kept them
from the poles. So what you see here is another
dissonance between what white women's concerns are and the lived
experiences of black women. And as the third wave of
e merges in the seventies and eighties, white women are
thinking about reproduction, their bodily justice, what it means to
(10:48):
live freely in their skin. They're taking off their braws,
they're burning bras and things like this. But this is
the Black power moment, right This is when black women
all over the country are trying to fgure out what
it means for us to have rights against a carceral state.
This at the same time that the war on drugs
is increasing, and there's a huge epidemic across the north
(11:10):
of the A's and HIV crisis, right, And so black
women are thinking, what does it mean for us to
live in community with folks who are not thinking about
our concerns? Right, So there's always been this disconnect between
white women's kind of mainstream feminist concerns and the lived
experiences of black women. Right. So black feminism has endured
(11:35):
all this time. Right, people for some reason associated with
the coining of intersectionality in nineteen eighty nine and nineteen
ninety one, but in actuality, intersectionality was a concept before
it was a theoretical term, right, people were thinking. Anela
Cooper was thinking about intersectionality when she wrote A Boye
from the South. Id B. Wells wrote in Southern Horrors
(11:58):
about the ways that little black girls were sexually assaulted
but there was no punishment for their aggressors because they
were both black and girl. Right, So she was already
thinking about those intersections of identity. So all this time
we have been having a kind of intersectional feminist conversation
in Black feminist circles. It's just been overlooked by the
(12:20):
mainstream movement. And unfortunately that is part and parcel with
mainstream white feminism that it typically just associates itself with
the concerns of white women trying to be more like
or closer to white men, but not really being in
coalition with and in solidarity with black women. Jenn, let me.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Ask you this too. Thank you for that, because I mean,
it's like you just gave us a brief insight into
what I would imagine a one oh one and a
one oh two class withmen the like talk by you
tell me where you see or where you have found
black queerness inside of black feminism, and how you articulate
(13:07):
that inside of your book, how you have articulated that
inside of the teachings and the learnings right that you
both provide and have experience through your life.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I always say, I've
always been a young, like black queer girl from Oakland, Right.
I think my mother very much clocked me as a child, right,
She would put me in stockings and dresses and all
these kind of girly things, and I was just I
was propelled by it, and I was six foot four
(13:40):
by the time I was twelve years old, and I
played sports and I was always leaned masculine, so I
was a very gender queer teenager. My favorite shoe was Jordan's.
To my sixth grade graduation, I wore stockings, a leather vest,
a colored white shirt, a black skirt with slits up
the side, and on bat boots, you know. So it
(14:02):
was always yeah, and I was class president. So I
walked on stage and gave a speech in that outfit.
You know, I've always been this person, you know, I've
always been this queer girl, and I was so I
was so blessed and so lucky that my mother, who
was not tall, I'm the only tall woman in my family.
(14:24):
And they were all kind of like, we don't know
what to do with you up there, right, But my
mother and my grandmother's were very adamant about me loving
myself and me being fully in my body and being
proud of who I am and who I was, And
so my mom would always say, like, you keep your
head up, you never look down, you never hunt your shoulders,
(14:45):
you never you never shrink for people. You know, body,
you stand upright in your skin. And even when I
felt small on the inside, or when I was hiding
my gender and sexuality, when I was hiding my desires
because in a religious family, I couldn't say, hey, I
like girls, right, it was hard to express that, and
(15:07):
it slipped out from time to time. When I was eleven,
I combed my hair up into a high top faith
and I walked into my mom's bedroom. I said, Mom,
a boy, and she said, girl, if you don't get
out my bedroom, I am watching a movie, I'm not
you know, you know. And we never talked about it again,
but it was one of those She wasn't upset with me.
(15:27):
She was just like, don't interrupt my movie, you know.
And I think in a lot of respects my mother
allowing me to explore myself, you know, as I wished,
was how my queerness showed up, you know, And that's
how it shows up in the book. Right. So in
the book, I talk a lot about these moments where
(15:50):
I was discovering and this is this is gonna sound weird,
just I'm just gonna and say it. I didn't actually
really understand that I was gay until I was much
much older. And when I say much much older, I'm
I mean like in my thirties, mainly because in Oakland,
like everyone's like a little bit gay, right, So, like
Oakland is a very queer place. Berkeley is a very
(16:11):
queer place. It's a place where there's a lot of hippies, right,
And I felt like we were all doing a little
bit of queer shit. I was like, Oh, y'all like girls, right,
everybody likes everybody, you know. So for me, growing up
in California, in Oakland and Berkeley, in the Bay Area
in the eighties and nineties, being ginger queer wasn't weird.
We had a cross dressing day at my high school
(16:31):
and it was my favorite theme day. It was my
favorite theme day. I dressed like a boy, I painted
on a mustache, I got all my and the girls
flirted with me all day. I was like, this is amazing.
It was my favorite day. And no one thought it
was weird that we all would cross dress. The boys
would do it, everyone would cross dress. And as I
(16:52):
got older, I realized, oh, that's very that's very progressive, right,
that's even the teacherss would do it. I had a
a French teacher. He was a teacher in biology, but
he was a french Man and he had a full
hairy chest, and he would come to school in lingerie,
women's lingerie, you know, and he would just walk around
all day and women's lingerie, you know, and we were like,
(17:13):
this is fine. It said, Lacurt, you wear your lingerie.
And this was a big man, okay, my size and buff.
So you know, these things I think made queerness so
natural to me that it didn't stand out until I
left home. Right when I left home and people were like,
why are you like that? Like what's and I was like,
(17:35):
what do you mean? And it started to cast a
light on the queer ways of being that had already
been acceptable and kind of that's who I was. And
that was when I turned to black feminism to be
like why why does everyone think I'm so weird? Like
why am I having such a hard time fitting in
in these spaces? Right? And that's the cricket room that
(17:56):
most of Harris Perry talks about, and I talk about
it in the introduction chapter where we're walking around, right
and we're trying to we're trying to fit in this
space and we think we're off right, but in actuality,
the room is crazy. The room is asking us to
behave in certain ways right that are not natural to
our bodies. And so we're trying to stand up right,
(18:18):
we're trying to fit and the room is just not
the room we should be in, right. And it took
me years and years and years to realize that, in
this queer body, I needed to just stand upright and
walk out of that room. And for so long I
was trying to fit myself and fit myself and fit myself.
And so this book is really also a kind of
coming of age story of me walking through that journey
(18:41):
and understanding I don't have to fit myself into those rooms.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
I think the beauty of this book, but also of
your own intertwining story is like the courage that it
takes to say, as black women, as black people, this
room ain't right, it's not me right, and I'm going
to walk out of it right, and I'm going to
(19:05):
walk into and create something else right, because I think
that it has always been that the one size fits
all mentality of this country, right, which is that everybody
that comes here or is brought here, is forced here,
is forced to assimilate into some watered down, meek, small,
(19:29):
you know, docile version of who they actually are. And
I think that you know what your book, as you say,
your love letter, you know Black women taught us is
like no, you can leave that room. That room isn't
for you, Like that room isn't for you. And I
love that. With a few minutes that we have left,
(19:52):
I want to talk about what we have seen recently
in culture come across our screens. With most recently, I
want to talk about Amanda Seals first, a comedian actress
who was it like a couple of weeks ago op
ed written about her and the fact that she is
(20:15):
not palpable in some black spaces and for some black people.
I mean, I don't know what else to say. I
don't know what other word to use, but she has
called out the black establishment, whether it's in media and Hollywood,
in this or that has a very acidic and this
is coming from me. This is coming from me who
says a lot of hot shit but has a very
(20:37):
acidic tongue when when talking about black people experience this
is that and the other thing, and gen people are
coming for her. They are coming for her, to the
point where I just saw on social media doctor Mark
lamon Hill coming out and saying, you know, the media,
a pylon that is happening around Amanda Seals is now
(21:00):
write and like, you know, I support her, blah blah,
make it make sense about what is happening in this universe.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
So you know what, you know what this is the thing.
I made a post about this on Instagram and people
were upset because there is okay, So there's two parts
to this, which I think that people have to understand.
We don't have to choose sides. Right. There are the
people who say we should love one another, we should
offer grace to black women. This is you know, the
original piece was in essence and they're like, this is
a publication that's meant to uplift black women. How could
(21:32):
you all write this? So I understand that, right. There's
other side, which is kind of where I started off,
which is like, yeah, but people don't like her, right,
and that's okay, right. We don't have to like everyone, right.
There are plenty of people in academia, in publishing, in
entertainment who I don't personally like, right, and that don't
(21:53):
personally like me, and that's okay, right, And that was
kind of where my stance was. Now I'm in a
different place, and I'm in a place because I watched
a video of hers on Twitter where she was like
yelling like this is enough, enough is enough. I don't
know you people, And what I honestly want to say
about this is that grace is so important and accountability
(22:16):
is just as important. Right. And if people over the
years have come to you and said, we really don't
appreciate how you talk about poor black folks and these
nikes and Jordan's suits tracksuits or whatever, and passports, we
really didn't enjoy when you were defending Sean King. We
(22:39):
really felt a way when you were saying that Charlemagne
is your friend. These things hurt us because we like
you and we want better for you. Right. That What
people don't understand is that that is love. Right, Because
if people don't call you in, if people don't say
anything to you at all, that means they could care
(23:00):
less what you do or say. It's like you walk
outside with a booker in your nose and your friend
nless you get into a front of a room of
people with a booker hang out your nose or suspinaging
your teeth, right, that's not your friend. Right. But we
have been a friend to Amanda, and we have said
we don't like these things, and we expect more of you.
You only expect more of people who you believe have
(23:23):
the capacities do better. And unfortunately, each time that folks
have come to Amanda and said, hey, we really want
you to do better, Amanda has said, I don't care
what y'all think. Okay, yeah, and yeah, she doubles down,
she will go and do an interview about it, and
(23:44):
triple down. She'll never apologize. I don't think I've actually
even heard her say I'm sorry for saying these things
that might have hurt poor black folks or whatever it
might be. She doesn't. She does not hold herself accountable right,
and it's not clear who she is accountable to, right.
So the work the people always think about, I love
(24:05):
black people, and I love black people, and I love
black people, but if you love someone, you have to
be accountable to them. Love without accountability is abused. That's
all it is. That Bell Hooks taught us this. Okay,
love with no accountability is a form of abuse. And
(24:25):
unfortunately a lot of people who have promoted her been
behind her, followed her, told everyone about her, thought she
was great now feel disrespected, disposed of, and abused by her.
And I can't count myself in that because I released
(24:46):
her quite some time ago when she was doing the
whole anti black passport thing. That's a line for me.
I came from a place where that's the trigger for me. Also,
Jordan's is my favorite shoot, and I'm never gonna stop
buy at them. I didn't get a passport until I
was thirty two years old, but I had about over
two dozen pairs of Jordan's before then. You know why,
because I needed to have shoes on my feet. Right.
This is the language of people who use welfare policy
(25:09):
to ensure that folks don't have enough food to feed themselves.
It's the same language. It's the same dog whistley, right,
And so when people call her in, she has to
be able to listen and to hold that calling in
and to be accountable to them, because if she's not accountable,
this will continue happening. This is how it works, right.
(25:31):
And I can say this again, like you said, you
say some hot shit, I say some hot shit, right.
But if somebody comes to me and say, Jim, that
was a miss, I'm ana listen. I'll listen there's.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Something exactly yeah right, yeah, right.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
There's something I say. I say what I said right
if it's reasoned right, if it's reasoned right, but if
it hurts black folk, absolutely not. I I have a duty,
in my opinion, to stand in the gap for all
black people, no matter what they come from, no matter
who they are, And that is something that is at
the center of my work, and it's just not clear
(26:06):
to a lot of people who was at the center
of Amanda's work at this point.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Thank you for that. You were one of the first
people that I text, you know when the Essence story broke,
because I had seen your posts and I was just like,
you know, because I am a person who will also
like hold myself to account. Did I go too far?
Did I say too much?
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Like what?
Speaker 1 (26:32):
And that is this the truth? Like all of those things,
Like as a person with a public platform, you know,
there is accountability and responsibility that comes with that. And
I'm just like, oh, am I treating her too harshly?
Am I criticizing her too much? Right? Because pop culture
is not is not my lane. But when I see
people who are in Hollywood then move into political spaces,
(26:57):
but then do so with a white so premise tint
in their lens and language. Then like, I do feel
like there that is the space for me to say,
you know, like who is for? Like who is your
who is your audience? And like what is what is
the center? And what is the purpose that you were
moving from the space that you're moving from is it
(27:20):
of purpose outside of yourself? And so I think that
those distinctions are really important. And so I just I
thank you for breaking that down. I am so excited
for you. I am so excited for this book, folks.
It is out now. Black women taught us. Go get it,
buy it for yourself, buy it for a friend.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
You know.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
It is beautiful, it is brilliant, and I just I
thank you so much for making the time for us
here at will kay Affen on your tour de force.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
I appreciate it anytime, anytime for you. I love it here.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
That is it for me today, dear friends, on woke
a f as always Power to the people and to
all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.
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