Week 1 / Fall 2024: A course in Black Feminisms
Professor Barbara Christian—author of the seminal article in Black Feminisms "The Race for Theory"—featured in the San Francisco Examiner, October 1972.
The typical trajectory for a doctoral student in my department is to finish coursework by the end of the second year, so that you can solely focus on Qualifying Exams. I knew, early in the process, that I would probably continue taking classes as long as it didn’t make me feel awkward to share that space—or to take up space—with earl[ier]-stage doctoral students.
This is to say, that this semester, I am taking a course in Black Feminisms. A couple of things happened on the first day of class on Thursday, including a relatively brief discussion of work from bell hooks, Barbara Christian, and Brittney Cooper. But, before that, we introduced ourselves—which has been the bane of my graduate school existence. I struggle with this practice on multiple levels. The first is that there are a handful of people who take the opportunity to speak about their work for no less than five minutes. Even though there are over 20 people in the room, and the professor has probably only allotted about 30 minutes (in their head) to do intros. By the third minute, my eyes inevitably glaze over. The second is that, whereas other people, even in their first years, seem to be presenting a detailed dissertation prospectus, already, I don’t have anything to say with that kind of detail, that kind of gusto. And even when I have firmly established my dissertation topic, I’m not sure that I will want to.
bell hooks.
At any rate, knowing how much I struggle with this practice, you’d think I’d better prepare for it. But, nope. I go in cold. Largely distracted throughout the other introductions, I try to get all of my words aligned just right in my head. I rarely say things exactly as I wanted to. And I often find that a few moments after I have gone, I figure out something else that I wish I had said. This happened during class on Thursday. Specifically, we were asked to speak about our interest in the course. Our draw to Black Feminisms. And while what I said was not untrue, it was boring. And didn’t really represent the fullness of why I ended up in that space. I wish, instead, that I had said something like this:
My first exposure to Black Feminism, as it resonates for me today, was in St. Louis, Missouri. Was in a high school auditorium in the suburbs. Was at a documentary screening. Where a queer, black, woman organizer from Ferguson—whom I had seen on Buzzfeed months before moving to St. Louis—stood up and started raging. I don’t remember what she said. But I remember feeling like maybe I would never be the same. When I think of the phrase “Assata Taught Me,” I also think of her. Not because she came up with it, necessarily. I don’t in fact know who did. But because she and so many other black queer organizers in St. Louis understood themselves to be part of a lineage that followed Assata Shakur, and they wore sweatshirts in her honor. Understood themselves to be theorizing about black life while standing on the frontlines of the Ferguson Uprising—in the ways that Barbara Christian (look at me circling back to the top) talks about black women theorizing from practical and lived experiences.
Assata Shakur. I found this image—for which I could find no date or place—to simply be radiant.
I did not, yet, have my own theories about black life—at least not ones that I knew how to articulate—in those early days of being in St. Louis. Or in that high school auditorium. But I think that it was there that I learned how to do so. And I see myself, thus, as part of this lineage of Black Feminisms. And deeply invested in knowing more about the ones who’ve come before me.
