Feminism, Intersectionality, Misogynoir, and Learning Lessons From the Past to Advance Equity Today

Abstract

Jenn M. Jackson (pronouns: they/them), a professor of political science, New York, USA, presents their first book entitled Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism, which is a considered explication of the immeasurable influence that many Black women have had on shaping historical events and progressive racial equity movements in the USA. Jackson raises a key question: Why have Black women's lived experience, activism, and theorizing been so overlooked in terms of their pivotal role and continuing relevance for ongoing antiracist struggle? The book comprises 11 chapters highlighting Black women's influence spanning almost two hundred years, many of whom have been omitted from conventional historical accounts. The content juxtaposes the storytelling of several historical Black women and Jackson's own experiences of racism, sexism, misogynoir, queerphobia, transphobia, and ableism, bringing them starkly into conversation with each other to generate understanding and expand knowledge. Jackson's identity as a Black, queer, nonbinary, gender-questioning, and disabled feminist permeates the chapters. Jackson describes themself as an awkward, very tall Black girl and reveals their own attempts at passing in everyday life through masking their authentic identity inside patriarchal, heteronormative, and cisnormative societal structures. Heteronormativity, a systemically embedded phenomenon that legitimizes normative notions of gender and reinforces the idea of compulsive heterosexuality, and cisnormativity, predicated upon gender anatomy-identity congruence and a binary distinction of “male” and “female” identities (Robinson 2022), feature in Jackson's lived experience. Jackson (36) writes that “when you are trying to navigate the world in a gender-expansive, a-gender, complex body, and you're also poor, Black, and many other things, you learn very quickly what is acceptable, and what is frowned upon.” The subject of Chapter 1 is Harriet Jacobs (1813/15–1897), an African American feminist and abolitionist, whose experience of slavery included the constant threat of assault and physical intimidation from her slaver, alongside no legal rights to protect her body. Jackson condemns the transatlantic slave trade for its misogynoir, extending into Black women's bodies being attacked, exploited, and abused. Misogynoir includes the specific type of hatred, mistrust, negative stereotyping, prejudice, and suspicion directed at Black women (Bailey and Trudy 2018). Jacobs eventually escaped slavery using the Underground Railroad and wound up living in the cramped, unlivable crawl space of her grandmother's slave quarters. Jacobs became disabled from living like this, but Jackson argues that she had a modicum of agency, a point that students debate intensely. In Chapter 2, Jackson discusses the radical truth-telling of Ida B. Wells (1862–1931), a journalist and civil rights leader born into slavery. Wells, the co-owner of a Black free speech newspaper, decried the lynchings of Black Americans, exposed how they were murdered, and fought for their exoneration. Wells was renowned for challenging state-sanctioned violence and uncovered the role of the dominant White press in perpetuating damaging myths about Black people. Jackson commends Wells for speaking truth to power, particularly when Ku Klux Klan membership was rapidly rising. Chapter 3 outlines the work of Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), a feminist writer, anthropologist, and documentary filmmaker, with Jackson drawing out how Black women's contributions to entertainment, politics, and business in American life are purposely hidden and lost in history. Jackson highlights that Black women were units of labor exploited for profit by White slavers and plutocrats, who co-opted them for their own wealth creation. Chapter 4 focuses on Ella Baker (1903–1986), a civil and human rights activist whose principal message was the value of listening to young people. Jackson compares this with her first year as a tenure-track professor teaching Black feminist politics to Black, Latinx, queer, poor, and working-class students. Baker earned the name “Fundi,” a Swahili word meaning a person who teaches their craft to the next generation. Jackson chronicles how their own exposure, in their formative years, to African American storytelling from the Black community (Toliver 2021) had a profound influence on their psyche and on how they have written the book. Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977), an African American civil rights activist, is the subject of Chapter 5. Hamer's family endured years of indentured servitude to cotton plantation owners. In 1961, Hamer was forcibly sterilized, which Jackson notes as a symbolic and practical way of preventing reproduction and exercising power over Black women's bodies. Jackson outlines how Black women have a long history of medical maltreatment predicated on the falsity that they are impervious to pain, extending into brutal surgeries without anesthesia (Ho et al. 2021). Hamer campaigned for equal voting rights, at great risk to herself, experiencing physical violence at the hands of police officers. She was flagrantly herself, assertive, loud, direct, and confrontational, that is, “unrespectable” by mainstream standards. Jackson writes that she learned from Ella not to suppress their gender-fluid identity in favor of hyperfeminine behavior and robotic domestic practices. Shirley Chisholm (1924–2005), the first Black woman to be elected to the United States Congress, is the subject of Chapter 6. Chisholm campaigned tenaciously for holding whiteness accountable and equal rights and exposed structural, institutionalized racism. Jackson emphasizes that Chisholm posed a direct challenge to whitewashed history and emphasizes the ongoing repercussions for understanding racism, patriarchy, and misogynoir. Chapter 7 pays tribute to Toni Morrison (1931–2019), an American novel writer and editor, who centered writing “Blackly” in all her work, thereby embracing her own sovereignty and authority as a racialized person. Morrison wrote viscerally and provocatively about Black women and girls in a way that decentered the White gaze and exposed their traumas. Jackson consequently brings to light some uncomfortable truths, including the bodily harm, mental terror, and physical violence that Black women have endured over centuries. Chapter 8 is devoted to the Combahee River Collective (1974–1980), a Black feminist lesbian organization situated in Boston, USA. Jackson points out that their intersectionality concept demarcated how identity is socially constructed and politicized, which laid the foundation for subsequent intersectional feminism. Jackson's intersectional experience of racism and misogynoir as a Black, queer, and disabled feminist is also interspersed throughout the various chapters. Chapter 9 focuses on Audre Lorde (1934–1992), a Black lesbian feminist, professor, civil rights activist, and poet who was concerned with issues of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. Lorde, concerned with the plight of Black women in South Africa, campaigned vociferously for their emancipation. Chapter 10 centers upon Angela Davis (born 1944), an American Marxist feminist whose work focused on the criminalization and overrepresentation of Black people in the legal, prison, and police systems and their reparation. Jackson praises Davis's anticapitalist stance and her extensive writings about labor exploitation being entwined with capitalist processes. Chapter 11 is devoted to bell hooks (1952–2021), an American feminist, theorist, and author, with Jackson honoring her various legacies, including Black community coalition building and comradeship, alongside the mantra that feminism is for everyone. Jackson ends the book with a précis of multiple Black feminists to ensure that their significant contributions are not lost and are remembered. The Black Feminist Coup is an extensive, multiauthored monograph on the topic of survival, trauma, and resistance to racism in academe. The book exposes racist and microaggressive tropes that Black women face and the consequences of resisting White supremacy in universities. Divided into seven chapters, the book centers around three Black academic women and their two women students and allies (the five authors) and their experiences of working at a USA university. Like Jackson, the authors use the storytelling tradition to unearth their accounts and outline how they were harmed in academia, describing it as a systemic site of racialized oppression and symbolic violence for Black women. They discuss the fear of reprisals for writing the book, ultimately deciding not to be held hostage to negative consequences. Through paying homage to the wisdom and knowledge of Black feminists from the past and present and describing their own solidarity, the authors offer solutions for radical transformative change, modeling a path forward for allyship between White and Black feminists to make academia more inclusive for everyone. In Chapter 1, the authors discuss Black women academics navigating often hostile White feminist spaces underpinned by race and class bias and evoke Sojourner Truth's Ain't I a woman? speech from the US 1851 Women's Rights Convention to underscore their point about the erasure of Black women's identity in normative feminist discourse. The authors argue that they were isolated and marginalized, leading them to suffer in silence. To illustrate their complex experiences, the authors use the analogy of the crooked room conceptualized by Harris-Perry (2011) as Black women bending, distorting, and adjusting themselves to fit societal expectations in the face of warped racial and gender stereotypes. The authors describe Black women being prevented from becoming a collective because they were viewed as a threat to accepted institutional norms, knowledge production, and praxis. Their intention in writing the book is to confront the strategic isolation of Black women in academic spaces. Chapter 2 places an emphasis upon embracing past Black feminist genealogies to analyze contemporary racialized predicaments and trauma. The authors highlight the importance of intergenerational communication relayed by Black ancestors to future generations to preserve cultural memories and connectivity between the past and present and to elucidate how past generations fought against racist and sexist oppression. The authors honor many historical thinkers as a way of countering traditional feminist revisionist historical accounts. Their overview spans early Black feminist antislavery thought in the 1800s, to Black liberation struggles in the 1950s and 1960s during the US civil rights movement, to contemporary Black feminist theory in the academy. Ella Baker, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Toni Robinson, Barbara Smith, and the Combahee River Collective, among others, are mentioned in the chapter. Chapters 3–5 outline the intersecting narratives of the three Black academic women, Mariam, Jennifer, and Staci, and Chapter 6 outlines Keiondra’s and Olivia's perspectives as the outsiders looking in. In Chapters 3 and 4, respectively, Mariam’s and Jennifer's storytelling pivots around their experiences of racism, microaggressions, and misogynoir from White feminist colleagues within a Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) space from 2015 to 2020. They argue that Black women’s appointment, presence, scholarship, and experiences were co-opted into the GWS department to enhance its reputation, rather than being motivated by genuine solidarity. A complex environment of nepotism, noncollegiality, and antagonistic behaviors, as well as power play over the departmental chair position, is described. The authors contend that feminist facades were used to legitimize harm, uphold patriarchy, and enhance White privilege, incorporating unfounded attacks upon their characters as antagonistic Black women, underpinned by angry, troublemaker tropes. Mariam and Jennifer outline that the final catalyst for their departure was the US summer of racial unrest in 2020 against police brutality and systemic racism, which they believe was co-opted by the GWS leadership to advance their ambitions and interests. Staci's account in Chapter 5 revolves around being hired in 2019 by the same university as the associate dean in a department that historically lacked racial diversity. Staci highlights that she experienced issues from some White women in academe who have bought into and internalized White supremacist ideology, but also from some White men and some Black women. Staci describes how several colleagues who purported to be supportive of feminist issues contributed toward her being subjected to discriminatory behavior and unfair treatment. Staci outlines how her leadership assessment by others incorporated negative stereotypes of her and the racial microaggressions that she experienced. Staci discusses the notion of excessive surveillance of Black women's speech (Browne 2015), which was used to complain about her leadership approach within an already dysfunctional environment. When Mariam, Jennifer, and Staci sought recourse through official channels, they found that university reporting systems protected the institution rather than being designed to engender justice. They state that this is compounded by Black women enduring the trope of being impervious to pain and consequently being subjected to continual abuse. Chapter 6 is devoted to the two allies, Keiondra and Olivia, both graduate students who worked mainly with Jennifer at the same university, and highlights their experiences as bystanders and witnesses to the aforementioned events. Keiondra reveals her perspective as a Black graduate student ally, and Olivia as a graduate student, friend, and White woman ally. Their observations mirror each other's, resulting in a unified dialogue with the aim of modeling allyship between Black and White women in academic spaces. Keiondra discovered that her ambitions to pursue Black feminism-based research were discredited and that her local community engagement work was devalued and viewed negatively. Olivia witnessed misogynoir and White feminism being prioritized and critiques the latter for paying lip service only to issues of intersectionality. Both Keiondra and Olivia highlight dysfunctional situations in which White solidarity emerged, characterized by White colleagues closing ranks to support each other (DiAngelo 2018). The denouement of the book, Chapter 7, focuses upon the path to liberation for all through the implementation of pragmatic solutions and practical steps for change. To this end, the authors emphasize the importance of equity, cross-racial alliances, and authentic sisterhood dynamics, incorporating intersectional acknowledgment of sexism, racism, and classism, supported by actual university administrative accountability to engender meaningful change. The book, therefore, contributes not only toward analyzing White supremacist practices, institutionalized racism, and systemic inequities, but also how universities could be radically transformed. Jackson's Black Women Taught Us and Richardson et al.’s The Black Feminist Coup are captivating reading in the area of antiracist scholarship. Both books contain a repository of information about the work of historical and contemporary Black women figures, philosophers, writers, and political activists. Specifically, these books detail the importance of excavating their legacy and charting ways of dismantling systemic oppression for progressing social justice through the continuation of the storytelling method. The two books critique how intersectionality theory has become depoliticized, misappropriated, and watered down, without recognizing how systems of power stratify Black women differentially, thereby problematizing the limits of orthodox feminism. Both sets of authors outline the challenges experienced by Black women scholars and their allies when dealing with racism and misogynoir in academe, noting that their experiences are significantly compounded by gender and class. Both books include another recurring theme, specifically, vivid examples of misogynoir. Jackson draws out damaging stereotypes and tropes of Black women as (1) the Mammy, represented by Black women being obese, always wearing an apron, and happily sacrificing themselves to work as domestic servants for White people; (2) the Sapphire, incorporating Black women portrayed as unreasonably aggressive, angry, and hostile; and (3) the Jezebel, an erroneous misrepresentation of Black women as lacking modesty and sexual restraint, which White slavers calculatedly used to justify their perpetration of abuse (Collins 2024; Warren-Gordon and McMillan 2022). Similarly, Richardson et al. center these damaging tropes and misogynoir in their conceptualization of their experiences and argue that notions of workplace inclusivity, acceptability, and respectability are anti-Black. Authors of these two important books stress the deep historicity predicating current racist norms, and through illuminating past feminist wisdom, activism, and fortitude, they call for readers to embrace past lessons to continue antiracist work. By highlighting that historical Black feminist thought and uprising should not be erased or forgotten and revealing their own philosophy and praxis, the authors write themselves into identifying contemporary ways of challenging White hegemonic racialized power and discourse. For these reasons, both books provide hope to those people whose lives have been made miserable by racism through providing pragmatic pathways for addressing it, coupled with ideas for building safe, productive spaces for all within university workplace settings and beyond. The author declares no conflicts of interest. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.