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Tag Archives: Patricia J. Williams

Black Women, Feminism, and Writing on My Mind

25 Saturday Aug 2018

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Black Feminism, Brittney Cooper, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Colson Whitehead, Derrick A. Bell, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Ijeoma Oluo, Interrogation, Intersectionality, Kiese Laymon, Misogynoir, Misogyny, Mona Eltahawy, Morgan Jerkins, Ona Judge, Patricia J. Williams, Roxane Gay, Self-Reflection, Social Justice, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Women of Color, Writing


“This is what a Black Feminist looks like” t-shirt, August 24, 2018. (http://youtube.com).

It’s been a different last year and a half for me as a reader. With the exception of Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, a woman of color has been the author of every book I’ve read since January 2017. Keep in mind, Cora is the main character in Whitehead’s latest masterpiece, so it’s been since Walter Mosley’s last Leonid McGill mystery that I’ve read a book with a Black man as a protagonist.

This wasn’t a deliberate decision, at least at first. It started with me catching up on law professor Patricia J. Williams‘ critical race theory works from the 1990s, especially The Alchemy of Race and Rights (1992). I fell in love with the book, and found it in so many ways better than anything I’ve ever read from Derrick Bell. Williams is simply a better writer and storyteller, even as Bell hit all the right notes in his incredible allegories. Both have informed my Al Jazeera and Washington Post articles over the past year.

Then I started reading Roxane Gay at the end of last summer. I was going to do both Bad Feminist and Hunger, but after reading through the first chapters of Hunger, my wife ended up reading it and telling me about it in detail. I did the same for her with Bad Feminist. There was quite a bit of overlap on the personal side of things from both books. But boy can Gay write, and edit, and edit, and edit some more! Every word she must’ve put through an acid test, quenched in cold water like a samurai sword, then reheated, cooled, and polished for months on end. In recent years, only Whitehead and Kiese Laymon have polished sentences the way Gay does in her books. I felt her hurt, disappointment, anger, laughter, and intellect throughout. After reading it, even in places where I disagreed, I felt like Gay left me with so much to chew on as a sexist feminist heterosexual Black man.

I picked up Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage in May. It was after reading Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Lower Ed and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah in early 2018. Cottom’s book is so important, especially in understanding that higher education is far from some idealistic and lofty intellectual enterprise. It is lightly regulated capitalism, plain and simple, and not just among the for-profits, either (more on this at some future date). Cottom makes a generous use of rational-choice theory in her assessment of the limited range of decisions poor Black men and especially African American women living with poverty have in choosing for-profits for certificates and degrees, and for borrowing tens of thousands of dollars.

The book shines when Cottom touches on the journeys of the students she interviewed as part of her research. But like most scholars, Cottom’s writing didn’t bridge the divide between important work and compelling writing. I’m sure that this is an unfair assessment. But given the importance of Cottom’s sociology of education work and the stories involved in it, I wanted more direct interrogation of the systemic sexism and misogyny (even misogynoir) embedded in the enrollment practices of for-profit colleges and universities. I wanted more of Cottom’s personal journey (and not just her professional one). I’m sure, though, that Cottom gave her best, and it was more than what I could typically get out of text genuinely attempting to move beyond the academic’s gaze.

Adichie’s work was disappointing. Not because Americanah isn’t reasonably well written. It’s just too long, too centered on Ifemelu (about ninety percent of the book is from her perspective, when the blurbs make it seem a bit more even between Ifemelu and Obinze), and too self-centered, smug, and elitist. I felt all of the meanings of outsider embedded in Americanah to be sure. As a American Black man, I’ve been an outsider even among other heterosexual Black males most of my life. Adichie doesn’t allow for her main character to interrogate her outsider status, though. As a result, Ifemelu related to her American boyfriends in the most superficial of ways, as if they were perfect robotic representations of neurotic Americans. She related to the world as if she was somehow above it all, both in the US and Nigerian contexts. I guess heterosexism was as acceptable in Ifemelu’s world as it has been in Adichie’s comments in the past couple of years. I must admit, though. Adichie can write sex scenes and scenes of trauma in emotionally demanding and touching ways. But not with the precision of Whitehead and Gay, and not with the intellectual awareness of Cottom.

So when I picked up Cooper’s Eloquent Rage, I was expecting to be fighting with myself over boredom and a glut of words. I was so happy to be so wrong! Right from the first paragraph, Cooper was throwing fastball’s like Nolan Ryan and Vida Blue, or rather, hitting first-serve aces like Serena and Venus Williams. Cooper had me at “[t]his is a book by a grown-ass woman written for other grown-ass women. This is a book for women who expect to be taken seriously and for men who take grown women seriously. This is a book for women who know shit is fucked up.” She welcomed me in and said, “hit this 130 mph serve, brotha!” I couldn’t stop reading until I finished the book. I understood so much the struggles she described and the choices she and others made as Black women. I felt her pain, her joy, her anger, and yes, her rage throughout. I regularly interrogate my -isms as is. But Cooper helped me reach another level in Eloquent Rage (all premature hints at Beyoncé’s superhero feminism aside).

After Cooper, I made the deliberate decision to read more feminists of color this summer. I read Morgan Jerkins‘ This Will Be My Undoing and found her a wonderful writer on her coming of age with her own Black feminism, if a bit too young (I am middle-aged, after all). I finally read Mona Eltahawy’s Headscarves and Hymens and wanted to beat up every man she and the women she interviewed encountered over the years. It was compelling (if at times uneven) reading, and it left everything in question regarding the West, Islam, the Arab world and misogyny. There were no sacred cows with Eltahawy. She even addressed her relative privilege in addressing the latticework of gender, LGBT, and sexual oppression in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UK, the US, and elsewhere in the world. I wish I had gotten to her book three years ago, when it first came out.

I snuck in Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s book on Ona Judge, Never Caught. I’d been wanting to read it since I heard Dunbar talk about it on WAMU’s The Kojo Nmandi Show Valentine’s Day 2017. Plus, I decided to assign it for my upcoming African American History to 1877 this semester at American University. Dunbar puts the use of narrative nonfiction writing to the test in Never Caught. I can only imagine what my academic historian colleagues would think, as most of their writing is the equivalent of a pressed protein bar made of unflavored soy powder and coated with ground mealworms. Although Dunbar provides many more questions than answers around the inner thoughts and everyday actions of George and Martha Washington eventual escaped slave, I did sense that Dunbar was converting research into a form of textual humanity. So much so that when the moment for Judge to escape came, I said, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Dunbar compelled me not to be too excited, though. For “Judge knew that…She would transform from a trusted house slave for the most powerful American family to a criminal, guilty of stealing her own body away from her owners.” (p. 112).

Embedded in Dunbar’s narration are the issues I’d been reading about for the past year. Misogyny, misogynoir, enslavement, rights to one’s own body, intersectionality, American history and its mythologies, and the long legacy of American racism, still very much alive in 2018, as it was in 1789 and 1796. To be sure, Dunbar lacks Gay’s precision, and the passion found everywhere with Cooper and Eltahawy is more subdued in Dunbar’s work. But the latter is only true if readers choose to ignore the smoldering billows throughout.

I finished up this month with Ijeoma Oluo’s So you want to talk about race, a primer on basic do’s, don’ts, and don’t-give-ups, regarding starting and sustaining conversations on race and racism in an American context. After the previous reads, I hoped for more, but there wasn’t any more for me to mine as a reader. There were several points, though, where a more careful edit would have made this a clearer read. As a blogger for the past eleven years, I have no room to talk regarding editing. Then again, I presently do not have an agent or editors looking over my work, either.

My biggest criticism (which actually isn’t a criticism) is that the book is geared toward the White man or White woman who believes themselves to be a liberal, colorblind non-racist. Because this is Oluo’s stated intent, her book reads as if I’m an outsider to my own topic. The compelling personal issues with which Oluo contends around race and intersectionality (specifically, Black feminism and relative privilege) aren’t well treated until the last quarter of the book. As someone who once help manage a national social justice fellowship program, I wasn’t expecting to learn anything particularly new about starting and sustaining conversations on race and racism. I hoped, though, to learn more about Oluo, to find her writing more impassioned, to see her use real punch in bringing to bear the reasons that race conversations quickly devolve into White accusations of “reverse racism.” The elements are there, but weren’t mined in sufficient quantities to make this book more than a “Race/Racism Conversations for Dummies,” I’m afraid, for me.

That’s not to say that nothing resonated at all. Oluo early on hits at a theme common to everyone I’ve read over the past eighteen months. That need to find one’s true, authentic voice. Those moments when the people you know now find your writer’s voice too loud, too demanding, and too impractical.

I also started writing. I…started saying all the things that everybody around me had always said were ‘too negative,’ ‘too abrasive,’ and ‘too confrontational.’ It did not go over well. My white friends…some of whom I’d known since high school, were not happy with the real me. This was not the deal they had struck. Yes, they would rage over global warming and yell about Republican shenanigans, but they would not say a word about the racial oppression and brutality facing people of color in this country.

I’ve found this and so much more to be true in my own writing journey. Thanks to all of you who’ve helped make me feel younger, my feminism fresher, and confirmed so much I’ve found wrong (and right) with myself and the world.

In·ter·sec·tion·al·i·ty

24 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Academic Conferences, Afrocentricity, bell hooks, CMU, Critical Race Theory, Diversity, Elsa Barkley Brown, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Intersectionality, Kimberlè Crenshaw, Marginalization, Misogyny, Multiculturalism, OAH, Organization of American Historians, Patricia J. Williams, Paula Giddings, Pitt, Presidential Classroom, Racism, Sexism, Tera Hunter


Kimberlè Crenshaw quote, from “Whose Story Is It Anyway?: Feminist and Anti-Racist Appropriations of Anita Hill,” in Toni Morrison’s Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power, 1992, p. 403. (http://azquotes.com).

In truth, I’ve considered the issue of intersectionality as a historian and writer since 1993, when I wrote my quantitative methods requirement-fulfilling paper, “The Dying of Black Women’s Children.” Except that, for me and for most of my colleagues, the term was barely in use. Matter of fact, in five and half years of graduate school and in my first three years after finishing the doctorate, I may have heard the term used only once or twice. It’s not like I didn’t think about the unique issues facing women of color — especially Black women — in the context of US history and African American history. Sometimes as a historian, how leading Black men and White women marginalized African American women in education movements, in the suffrage movement, and in the Civil Rights Movement was all I could think about. In the context of understanding American education and the role of Black women as teachers and education, it made me reconsider the notion of education as a form of social control versus it as a form of social liberation as an and-both, and not an either-or proposition.

But, as with all other issues, I’m not perfect. I remember getting into an argument with an African American women at a joint Carnegie Mellon-University of Pittsburgh conference on diversity in 1992. She was a second-year master’s student in the public policy program at CMU’s Heinz School (now Heinz College) to my second year as a grad student and first as a PhD student. I had talked about my initial research on multiculturalism and Black education, and what that research could mean in terms of diversity in higher education. Over lunch, I barely got three sentences out about the implications before this student pounced on me for not taking a more Afrocentric approach to my research, all but calling me an Uncle Tom. She also pointed out that while I had accounted for race and gender in my work, I hadn’t accounted for them together. I was already used to middle class Black folk who only radicalized at the ripe young age of twenty-two telling me that my research was too conservative and too White. But on the second part, not accounting enough for Black women in my research, I did take to heart.

In 1999, at my “Black Brahmins” presentation on W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Locke and their ideas around multiculturalism and connections to Harvard at the Organization of American Historians conference in Toronto, I got a cold shoulder from the panel’s moderator, Stephanie Shaw. She barely said a word to me the entire time, and barely commented on my paper. I figured that Shaw thought I should’ve found a way to make the paper more inclusive of Black women graduates of Harvard and multiculturalism, even though Harvard didn’t allow any women to attend. I could’ve included Black women who attended Radcliffe College around the turn of the twentieth century, but even then, those women did not earn graduate degrees or become proponents of pluralism or what we’d call multiculturalism today. I followed up at OAH in Los Angeles in 2001 with my “Multicultural Sisters” paper, but by then, I no longer had an interest in multiculturalism as a historian.

Times Square intersection time-lapse, August 2014. (http://shutterstock.com).

On this day and date in 2000, though, was the argument I had with a colleague at Presidential Classroom, one that would keep me conscious about intersectionality and womanism from that point on. Sev had been brought on by my racist boss Jay Wickliff to help out with the international recruitment for the weekly civic education programs we had for high school juniors and seniors. Sev was Canadian, had been an intern with the program the summer before, and had recently finished up a master’s in history. She had stopped by my office to ask about some revisions I’d been making to parts of our upcoming summer programs, especially the one on media and democracy, which was a new program for Presidential Classroom. Somehow the conversation swung toward women’s rights and issues that Sev thought were important to women. I kept correcting her, saying that some of these issues were “only important to White women.” She took offense, telling me that I shouldn’t be correcting her, that her master’s made her as much an expert on the topic as me. I remember actually chuckling at that assertion, which miffed Sev even more. The common refrain, “Just because you have a PhD…,” was how she responded.

But I did take a few minutes to break down the differences between second-wave and third-wave feminism (or womanism). I went on about the history of exclusion that Black women in particular had faced from Black men in civil rights movements and White women around suffrage and reproductive rights. I said, “maybe it’s because you’re Canadian, but here in the US, these issues you’re bringing up mostly concern middle class White women.” She didn’t like that at all. Before Sev responded, Wickliff, having overheard our argument, came by and said, “Slavery was a hoax” as a joke. That was the moment I knew my days working for this group of Whiteness folks were numbered.

A few months later, in my new job at AED with New Voices, I picked up and read Kimberlè Crenshaw’s essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) for the first time. I knew that I already understood intersectionality for Black women, how misogyny, sexism, and racism constantly confer a double marginalization, discrimination, and violation on Black women. Now, between Crenshaw and my own experiences, I also realized that I could experience intersectionality as a Black man, between White men and White women. Especially middle class ones, where their well-meaning color-blind racism had served to put me in a box as well. It was an and-both box, where I was a historian who didn’t write about intersectionality enough and a professional who had also experienced race and gender-based marginalization, albeit differently from women or color. What I did learn, finally, was that the intersection of race, class, and gender made Times Square look like Walden Pond by comparison.

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