Black Herstory: Rosa Parks Did Much More than Sit on a Bus

As a Black feminist scholar, every February I find myself troubled by the ways that we simultaneously remember and forget women who look like me. Not that I’m satisfied with the memory of Black women every other month of the year but February–Black History Month–can be especially disappointing. I find myself wanting to rant to anyone within [...]

Happy-To-Be-Nappy Barbie

This week, a group of black women in Columbus, Ga., started a campaign to donate 40 black Barbie dolls to young black girls. And here’s the twist: Before gifting the Barbies, the women used boiling water and pipe cleaners to transform them into curly-haired “beauties.” In my 32 years on this earth, I’ve owned a [...]

What Occupy Wall Street Owes to Feminist Consciousness-Raising

On the November 17th national day of action for the Occupy Wall Street movement, I was interviewed by a man from a Swedish newspaper who wanted to know why I was there. I smiled and said, “That’s the question, isn’t it?” Everyone wants to know, still, even after the two-month anniversary of a movement that’s [...]

For Fans of Ntozake Shange, Finally, A Memoir

Ntozake Shange, feminist author of the critically acclaimed choreopoem for colored girls who’ve considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, as well as numerous poetry collections and novels (most recently the 600-page Some Sing, Some Cry, co-written with her sister Ifa Bayeza), gets personal, political and lyrical in her latest work, Lost in Language and [...]

How Audre Lorde Made Queer History

In her piece “Breast Cancer: Power vs. Prosthesis” in The Cancer Journals, black feminist lesbian mother warrior poet Audre Lorde wrote: “I also began to feel that in the process of losing a breast I had become a whole person.” This courageous insight and numerous others—about her mind, body and spirit being sites loaded with meaning, [...]

Woman is the “N” of the World?

In 1969, Yoko Ono coined the phrase, and I quote, “Woman is the N****R of the World.” Shortly thereafter, she and her husband, the late John Lennon, wrote and he recorded a song with that same title. According to Wikipedia (which is ALWAYS questionable), at that time (don’t know where they would stand today) Dick Gregory and Ron Dellums defended the [...]

Going Postal, Occupying Wall Street and KKK Analogies: Editors’ Picks, 9/23–10/1

When a woman of color says something you don’t like about politics, naturally her race and gender are to blame. Or so we’d be led to believe by the backlash this week against Melissa Harris-Perry (for those not familiar, an esteemed black feminist scholar, frequent MSNBC commentator and author of an acclaimed new book on the [...]

Should Black Women Oppose the SlutWalk?

An Open Letter from Black Women to the SlutWalk, signed by a hefty list of black anti-violence activists, scholars and community leaders, has been stirring conversation online since it was posted on Friday. Like previous Black feminist critiques of SlutWalk, the letter calls into question the anti-rape march’s reclamation of the word slut. The authors [...]

SlutWalk, Bahia-Style

Early this summer, I was in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, directing a five-week study-abroad program for Spelman College students when I began to hear buzz about the upcoming Marcha das Vadias, or SlutWalk. The first SlutWalk was held in Toronto, Canada on April 3 as an outraged response to a Toronto police officer’s comment that, in [...]

Sterilization of Women of Color: Does “Unforced” Mean “Freely Chosen”?

U.S. women of color have historically been the victims of forced sterilization. Some women were sterilized during Cesarean sections and never told; others were threatened with termination of welfare benefits or denial of medical care if they didn’t “consent” to the procedure; others received unnecessary hysterectomies at teaching hospitals as practice for medical residents. In [...]

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