Black Feminism is for Everyone

Why "stay in your lane" politics keeps us from collective liberation

In 1993, I left Texas and moved to America. Cincinnati, to be precise. They say Texas is “like a whole other country,” and although I’d been raised with this particular brand of Texas-nationalism, it didn’t really hit home until I moved to Ohio where I’d never seen so many enormous American flags. We had American flags in Texas, of course, but they always appear much smaller, and almost always set next to an equally-sized Lone Star Flag, to remind you that we might live in America but being in Texas is what’s most important.

U.S. flag in Ohio (left); Texas flag and U.S. (right)

I made that move because I applied for and won a post-doctoral fellowship. For those not in academia, that’s a commonplace in the biological sciences, but a rare thing in the social sciences. It’s meant to give the recipient more time to do research before going on to being a professor full-time. The reason I applied for a Taft Fellowship at the University of Cincinnati is because I wanted to study with and learn from Patricia Hill Collins, author of Black Feminist Thought. Early on in graduate school, I’d become fascinated by what was then a new idea: intersectionality. That is, instead of analyzing race separate from class separate from gender, as sociology had taught me, we could look at race, class, and gender simultaneously. This excited me in a way that I suppose people who study physics are excited when they discover a new star that forces them to adjust their thinking about all the knowledge they had about how the universe works. I remember thinking, this changes everything. It especially made me question what I’d been taught about feminism.

In practical terms, my post-doc meant that I got to hang out with Collins, sit in on one of her classes, and we formed a reading group with a few of the graduate students in her program. I learned many, many things from her but the one I want to mention today is what she said about who was reading her book. While she was working on the book, she shared parts of it with a class she was teaching at a nearby prison. This was a men’s prison and, like in the rest of the U.S. the majority of those incarcerated there were Black men. “They are my best readers,” she said. Many years later, I’d work at Rikers with young guys, mostly Black and Latino, and experienced the same thing: young men hungry for a path out of the gender regimes they grew up with. One of the enduring lessons I’ve learned from reading Black feminist writing is that it is for everyone. Yet, as a field, it remains undervalued and understudied by the world at large, and particularly by white women who identify as feminist. I want to offer some ways to engage and move us beyond what we might think of as the '‘barriers to entry” to the kind of deep engagement we need to move toward collective liberation.

Black Feminist Thought; Feminism is for Everybody; How We Write Now

”Stay in Your Lane” Politics

One of the pushbacks that I’ve gotten to my work is that I need to “stay in my lane.” Most recently, this has been one of the helpful suggestions to my critiques of a certain Broadway show that seeks to rehabilitate the history of white suffragists. One version of this pushback goes something like: “there are Black women in this show, so stay in your lane.” The adjacent critique is that the Broadway show’s creators are not Black, so creating a mostly white show from a white point of view is a worthwhile endeavor because the creators are “staying in their lane.” (Lots and lots of comments on all my socials making both these points, ad nauseum, hence this post.) I’ve come to see this as a kind of disciplinary rhetoric, a way of telling me, or anyone, to sit down and shut up.

Black feminist scholar Koritha Mitchell has written about this as “know-your-place aggression,” when those from the dominant culture tell sports figures to “shut up and dribble.” She cites examples that include experiences with racism, (hetero)sexism, trans antagonism, ableism, and Islamophobia. She argues that learning to identify the white mediocrity that fuels this kind of aggression is real self-care so those in marginalized communities can stop wasting energy by worrying about the opinions of people who use supposedly objective standards to judge everyone but themselves. This kind of disciplining rhetoric happens to white women that step out of line with the power structure as well, just ask the trio who were told to “shut up and sing” for criticizing George W. Bush.

Intersectionality is about More than Identity

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to claim queer ancestors lately, and when I think about my own lineage, I think of the Black lesbians of the Combahee River Collective, which included Audre Lorde, Cheryl Clarke, Demita Frazier, Gloria Hull, and Barbara Smith. A collective that had been meeting together since 1974, in 1997 they released their statement calling out the way both the Civil Rights Movement and the women’s movement excluded them and ignored issues of power in both. You can read the original statement here, and when you do, you’ll see that they were using identity (as Black lesbians) to talk about power. They were unapologetic about being socialist and anti-imperialist, writing that:

“The liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses.”

Put that on a t-shirt, get it tattooed on your arm, make a cross-stitch of it. This is the feminism we needed in the 1970s and it is the feminism we need today, perhaps more than ever. This is the kernel of truth at the heart of intersectionality. As bell hooks taught us, “We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.”

So, what gets in the way of that? The Black lesbians of the Combahee River Collective named one of the key obstacles as white feminism. Here’s what they said in 1977:

One issue that is of major concern to us and that we have begun to publicly address is racism in the white women’s movement. As Black feminists we are made constantly and painfully aware of how little effort white women have made to understand and combat their racism, which requires among other things that they have a more than superficial comprehension of race, color, and Black history and culture. Eliminating racism in the white women’s movement is by definition work for white women to do, but we will continue to speak to and demand accountability on this issue.

This hit me when I read it first, probably around the mid-1980s, as it does today. We still need to do more to address the racism in the white women’s movement, especially the liberal, identity-based, representation-is-all kind of racism. “Well, if there’s a Black woman present, then there’s no racism.” This is the liberal version of “Magical Negro” thinking.

Let me hold your hand while I tell you this, but just because there’s a Black woman in the room doesn’t mean that imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture isn’t operating. Very often, this is an example of what philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò calls elite capture, in which the wealthy and powerful co-opt activist energies to shore up the status quo. This is where the identity politics of “stay in your lane” representation leads, and as professor Ruha Benjamin recently reminded us, “Black faces in high places” will not save us. This is clear from the number of African Americans, like Linda Thomas-Greenfield in positions of power in the U.S. government, who have signed on to support an ongoing genocide.

The trap of representation as the be-all, end-all is one that even Black feminists can fall into. For example, the scholar who is often credited with the term intersectionality is Kimberlé Crenshaw, and she’s recently come under some criticism for her embrace of former prosecutor and current Vice President, Kamala Harris.

This tweet from July 9 by Professor Crenshaw from the Essence Fest has prompted a lot of discourse on the socials about what liberation looks like, and what it doesn’t. This version of intersectionality that relies solely on the representation of certain identities in power yet without considering the geopolitical location and support of imperialism, colonial dispossession, and genocide is not any kind of “feminism” that I recognize or want to be part of.

I don’t know how you look at the images from Gaza, or know about the US-funded destruction of lives there on a mass scale, the relentless disinformation campaign to deny it all, and still say that working to support Kamala Harris is some kind of feminist liberation. Liberation for whom?

Black and Decolonial Feminism Offers a Way Out of Feeling “Trapped”

I heard from a reader of Nice White Ladies recently that she felt “trapped” reading it, like there was “no winning.” I get this, I really do.

That feeling of being trapped is baked into identity politics. If we only consider feminism to be about our identity, then we are trapped. And, for those of us who are white women, it is an especially shitty deal we get in this culture, one in which we’re expected to be “ladies” but “lean in,” be “attractive” but not obsess about our appearance on Instagram. This is one of the things that is so very destructive about white feminism: it keeps us trapped in representational politics and desperately trying to make ourselves feel better in this little identity of being a “white woman.” This quest to feel better in our identities as white women is what prompts those labeled as “Karens” in 2020 to, four years on, hire a PR guy to help them rehabilitate their public image (this is the same project that Broadway show is engaged in, btw).

The way out of these series of traps is to find how our own oppression is linked with that of others, people who are different from us. How does one begin to understand that? Reading Black feminism, decolonial feminism, anti-imperialist feminism is one of the ways.

And, I get that not everyone reads (thanks for reading here!), so next week, I’ll do a series on some documentaries you can watch that will invite you into what Black feminism offers all of us.