by Lauren Dillard

When I was in college I believed that individuals could change the world. Somewhere in the back of my mind was the thought that small bits of positivity could outshine the wealth of ignorance, violence, and poverty that exists in the City of Baltimore. I envisioned my future as being full of peaceful protests and community service.

I’d stay in the city. I’d change the city. Coincidentally, this was around the time of the Baltimore Believe campaign, a well-publicized city-wide effort to clean up the streets both literally and figuratively. Yes, we were all on the right track. All around the city, billboards and signage screamed that change was coming. Believe!



In the dark of night, along with a friend, I’d carry with me a tub of sidewalk chalk and a mission. I’d walk around campus and write things like “Black is Beautiful” and “Love Your Race, Love Yourself.” My hope was that in the morning, our messages would help other students start their day with purpose and pride. Juvenile, yet inspirational. Some good vibes to begin the day.

Over my time in college, I spent more time thinking about how to be a positive revolutionary than I did going to class. I started my own community service organization, I posted rhyming, inspiring slogans on bulletin boards, I made flyers to rally volunteers. I wrote articles on GMOs in Boca Burgers and the wrongful acceptance of the N-word, I made my own newspaper. I was independent media.

I served the homeless at a shelter and tutored underprivileged third-graders. A resident at the shelter more than twice my age tried incessantly to date me. Tutoring and mentoring for an hour a week made little change in the lives of those kids.

I chanted with hundreds of others for more money to go to our school’s crumbling library and less to building a new football stadium. Those of us who demanded proper resources for effective learning at our university were long gone when the new library was built seven years after the stadium.

I painted "Love, Peace, and Vote for Change" on my clothes. Who knows if anyone cared?

It’s possible I cried the night Bush was elected. It’s definite that from my perch on bench outside of the dorms I heard someone scream, “Aww shit! We’re headed back into slavery!”

It was a bit dramatic and certainly an overstatement. But on the campus of a historically Black university in a city in desperate need of rescuing, the air of hope was fading.

Yet still, I believed! I was passionate and fiery, but young and without direction. My right fist was held high, but there was no revolution. Along with my group of friends and associates, I was a combination of impressively naive and unproductively focused.

But despite her many misguided failings, I was at one with my Inner Activist.

I lost her somewhere between leaving the warm cocoon of campus life and entering the rigid and cold adult world of a full-time employee. With stealth, my priorities shifted from empowering the masses and encouraging city-wide peace to remembering to set my alarm for work and making my car payment. I never knew what hit me as she made a slow descent away from being the definition of me.

Over the years, I have found myself searching for her, my Inner Activist, only to realize she is nothing more than a long, lost friend. Leaving a trail of guilt stretching straight from my past toward an awkward gaping hole in my present.

I wondered if she’d think I was lost and insignificant. If she would have ridiculed me for being black nanny to many white families. I’m sure she’d shudder at the sight of my feet planted firmly in the stereotype. Maybe she’d call me mammy.

If I could friend her on Facebook, I would. She was last seen many years ago. My Inner Activist might be stuck stagnant in the bowels of MySpace. I’d post on her Timeline “Hello! :-) It’s been a while! Hoping we can go out for coffee soon!”

Maybe she’d forgive me. Maybe she’d take me back. I’d wrestle with butt-hurt thoughts of her ignoring me in the 326 minutes it takes her to reply to my post.

Yes, I’d time it. I’ve really missed her.

Over cappuccino and vegan muffins, I would apologetically tell my Inner Activist that I’d simply and regretfully forgotten about our plans for the future. I would say I’d been distracted by paying the bills. Thrown off course by relationships masquerading as love and then actual real deal love. I’d plead with her to believe I’d never let a man, or anything else, get between us again. I was just trying to find myself, ya’ know?

My Inner Activist, she’d look at me with kind but disappointed eyes and I would catch the slightest hint of burgeoning revolution in her glare. Across the table, I might be close to crying but just before the impending tears escape she would say to me:

“I forgive you.”

I’d try to play it cool and not smile wide at this statement.

“I know in your heart you believed that you lost me but I have been with you all along.

Every time that you stood up to your employers who thought they could take advantage of you because you were young and black and they controlled your paycheck. And when you have used what little spare money you had to donate to teachers at underserved schools.

When you refuse to use the term “good hair.” When you teach your kids that black is beautiful, encouraging them to be a part of eliminating self-hate in their generation. When you set your sights on a successful life on your own terms, not to be bound by the path society has chosen.

Each time you make a conscious effort to raise your children to acknowledge their own inner activists. In a million little moments over the years when you chose what was right over what paid more, what was good over what was trendy, to believe the truth over widespread lies.


I was there. I work beside you. We stand together.”

When her monologue was through, I’d let those tears pour with the rapid pace of a cry held in for far too long.

Dammit, if my Inner Activist isn’t right, she’s still as clever and convincing as I remember.

That woman is still here. She’s not a girl anymore---losing her way and grasping for stable holds on a mountain for miscellaneous causes.

She hides in the depths of this quiet life of a mother obsessed with organic food and the social equality of toddlers. But, she is still here. She has learned that revolution doesn’t always come in the form of protests. It’s not always attention grabbing, colorful sidewalk chalk on a gloomy day. It may not be televised.

As time has moved on, I’d felt certain that I’d lost my Inner Activist.

Graciously, she accepted my friend request.

Photo: Shutterstock

Lauren Dillard is a crafty, overthinking wife and mother of two boys living in Virginia. She enjoys writing emotional essays about uncomfortable subjects and baking vegan cookies. Lauren is currently working on a book about the intensity of motherhood. You can find her work on The Establishment, Huffington Post, Scary Mommy, elephant journal, and her personal site.

by Ashleigh Shackelford

Rape culture is a culture in which gender and sexual violence, white supremacist misogyny, and inaccessibility to absolute bodily autonomy are the norm. Rape culture is pervasive within our everyday lives. We often center rape culture dialogues on how to avoid being assaulted or raped rather than telling people to stop being violent.

Rape culture is deeply embedded within our behaviors, our thought processes, our politics, our relationships, and our desires. But we need to dig deeper as a society and within our communities to push the conversation further. In fully addressing rape culture and sexual violence, we need to address that everyone is capable of engaging in sexual violence and/or rape. As frightening, uncomfortable, and disgusting as this reality is, we must address that violence is embedded in the tools we are given to love, to provide intimacy, and to interact with each other. There is no blueprint in which we’ve figured out what true, inherent consent culture looks like.


In addressing this complicated understanding of how rape culture (rather than consent culture) works, this doesn't excuse that most rape and sexual violence is perpetuated and enacted by cisgender straight men. This doesn’t excuse that misogynistic violence stems heavily from patriarchy and toxic forms of masculinity. But how do we move the conversation to push us to critical self-examination and deeper analysis of how violence works within our marginalized communities? How can we start addressing our role and our failures in engaging consent so as to transform our communities away from internalized rape culture politics?

In my navigation of being a queer, agender Black fat femme, I'm still plagued by the reality of rape culture permeating my relationships, my ability to decipher between misogyny and truth, and my own personal politics surrounding my body and autonomy. As someone who's dated primarily masculine-of-center folks, dealing with rape culture politics and misogyny has normally stemmed from my partner.

At the beginning of our relationship, my ex-girlfriend pressured me into telling her how many people I had slept with. I have never in my entire life told anyone how many people I've slept with due to the advice and Black femme power my mom instilled in me. But eventually, I gave in because I loved her and I felt like I owed her my truth. When I finally revealed my past, she broke up with me. We got back together after she calmed down (or rather, temporarily pushed her misogyny aside), but she still held it over my head and her internalized misogyny manifested in multiple ways within our relationship during the time we were together.

Another situation in which a partner's misogyny and rape culture politics violated me was with my ex-boyfriend, who was also 15 years older than me. He not only exploited me and forced me into non-consensual sex work, but he raped me on multiple occasions when I explicitly said I didn’t want to have sex with him. At the time, I didn’t know it was rape. I thought this is what women/femmes were required to do when their partner wanted sex but they didn’t. It took me years to understand that our relationship wasn’t actually a relationship. I was a transaction to this man. He used me, he sold me, he raped me, he disposed of me. The levels of trauma I carry with me because of his violence and exploitation still haunts every relationship I engage in.

Although these examples of my lived violence speak to the reality that rape culture politics affect masculine-of-center folks regardless of gender, sexuality, or race—I want to also share how I've participated in rape culture politics and abuse. This is important if we are to deepen our expectations of consent culture, even for women and femmes who are disportionately affected by sexual violence.


In a more recent relationship, I violated my partner unknowingly. During the first time we engaged in physical intimacy, I assumed that they just wanted to have sex with me. My assumptions were based off my insecurities of being a Black fat femme who is often only seen through the gaze of fetishization or demeaned as someone you can only love in the dark. Of course these assumptions do not excuse my behavior, but they contextualize how limited my understanding of the situation and the consent for this other person was. I was so focused on my own trauma and experience that I never questioned what the situation felt like for my partner at the time.

We were hanging out watching The Adventures of Mary Kate & Ashley and began kissing. Things got heated and we began dry humping. After a while, I guided their hand on my body—on my chest and eventually in my underwear. We went to third base and when it was over, they seemed okay in terms of their demeanor with me. We cuddled and started watching another movie. Mid-movie they stopped everything and said, “I really didn’t want it to go that far tonight.”

My heart sank because I was so confused. I thought they enjoyed it as much as I did. I thought they wanted to be intimate the way I did. But as they continued to tell me how they felt about the situation, I realized I didn’t communicate at all during our hookup. I realized that I relied upon them, a masculine person, to always tell me when they feel uncomfortable because I assume they’re trained to be vocal with their feelings. But my skewed expectations and my trauma don’t excuse that I perpetuated abuse within this interaction with my partner. I didn’t take it well. I made excuses. I felt attacked because how could I be abusive when I’ve been abused, and in ways that seemed incomparable to this situation?

But after reflecting, I realized how fucked up I was in making my abusive behavior about myself instead of my partner. I listened, and then listened some more. I processed, held space, and centered my partner. I apologized. And I committed to changing my behavior around consent and intimacy. I committed to repenting through actively unlearning violence everyday. I committed to never hurting them like that again.

I proactively asked my partner if they wanted me to separate myself from them, and leave the spaces that we both frequent to give them a decision in how they heal and navigate the pain I caused them. My partner did not want to break up with me though. They wanted me to hold them through it. In addition to carrying their own trauma, my partner was committed to understanding my trauma navigation by offering me the space to be forgiven and to grow. They still wanted to love me while holding me accountable, no matter how uncomfortable it got.

I understand that this situation does not happen all the time. Sometimes our partners or folks we engage in physical intimacy with are abusive in ways that do not warrant us to give them space to grow, but instead traumatize us beyond repair. Sometimes we violate our partners and we are not forgiven or allowed back in their lives. Sometimes our partners become violent to the point that we can’t engage in a conversation with them about what makes us uncomfortable. Sometimes our relationships mirror dysfunction and trauma on new levels that we don’t have the language to unpack or decipher in order to address our feelings around it. But sometimes we can find transformative ways to address violence in our relationships that allow for us to move through trauma instead of circumventing or perpetuating it.
Recently an article written by Kai Cheng Thom, titled "9 Ways to Be Accountable When You’ve Been Abusive," was published on Everyday Feminism. It beautifully illustrated something that we rarely talk about: survivors can be abusers. Often we center our trauma, our survival stories, and our pain so much so that when we hurt other people because of our own trauma, we are almost permitted to justify it because the origin of our trauma was never our fault. But ultimately, that maintains a cycle of trauma in our communities. Lather, rinse, repeat.

If we continue to use our trauma to avoid accountability, none of us will ever be free to move through our trauma to heal. If we maintain this idea that our trauma limits the harm we can do to others, especially to our partners or loved ones, we will never be free to break the cycles of trauma that white supremacist violence has manifested within our minds, our politics, and our behaviors. We must acknowledge that we have the power to harm others regardless of our pain and experiences.

Envisioning the future of consent culture means we must acknowledge the fact that we can be knowingly and unknowingly violent, abusive, or non-communicative with the people we engage with. Consent culture also means unpacking the intersections of agency and body autonomy when it comes to race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and size. The culture we build around consent must go beyond the bedroom and private spaces. We need to politicize access to bodies through touching other people without asking them, touching someone’s hair, asking about someone’s sexuality or gender, interrogating bodies who we deem as “Other,” and so forth. Consent culture means we are inherently holding space and agency for all people to exist freely without persecution or infringement upon their autonomy. Consent culture means we are accountable to our communities and to ourselves in upholding inherent body autonomy for everyone.

Author’s Note: I was given permission by my partner to write about the experience I had in perpetuating abuse within my relationship prior to publishing this.

Photo: Shutterstock

Ashleigh Shackelford is a queer, agender Black fat femme writer, artist, and cultural producer. Ashleigh is a contributing writer at For Harriet, a community organizer at Black Future, and the creator of a body positivity organization Free Figure Revolution. She is a Ratchet Black Feminist dedicated to dismantling anti-Blackness. Read more at BlackFatFemme.com.

by Bee Quammie

Historically, important Black women are determined. They’re risk-takers. Their art inspires culture and their culture inspires art. They defend their people, encouraging us to dream bigger, stand taller, and speak louder. They rewrite history, urging their community to embrace the authenticity within our birthrights, even when others say we shouldn’t be proud of who we are. They may do one or some or none of these things, but there is one woman who did them all: the Honorable Dr. Louise Bennett-Coverley, better known as Miss Lou.


Her life began in Kingston, Jamaica in 1919. And Toronto, Canada was where it ended in 2006. Her 86 years on this earth were marked by notable achievements like being the first Black student to attend England’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and being the inspiring force behind Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O” song, which he styled after Miss Lou’s recording of “Day Dah Light.” An award-winning Jamaican folklorist, writer, and educator, Miss Lou was many things to many people, yet one could argue that her greatest impact was in her ovation of Jamaican patois, or Jamaican Creole.

“Creole” is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “a mother tongue formed from the contact of a European language (especially English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese) with local languages (especially African languages spoken by slaves in the West Indies).” The Collins Dictionary describes it as “a language that has its origin in extended contact between two language communities, one of which is generally European. It incorporates features from each and constitutes the mother tongue of a community.” The community of West African slaves who were forced into servitude in Jamaica created this mother tongue from the languages of their colonizing masters and those of the homes they left behind. Speaking patois was an act of survival, an act of solidarity, and an act of rebellion—and patois itself has grown and morphed from those days until now.

“Miss Lou made Jamaican Creole valid,” states Marlene Gaynair, a doctoral student at Rutgers University studying Black Atlantic history. Miss Lou’s life spanned the days of Jamaica’s staunch British allegiance through its independence in 1962, and from her time as a Kingston girl to her time as a Jamaican in Britain, in Canada, and beyond. Her work reflected those experiences. In a climate that was rife with the effects of colonialism alongside bubbling Black pride, Jamaica tried to assert its identity through the perception of social conservatism. The country that has more churches per square mile than any other country in the world cloaked itself in respectability imposed upon it via colonialism. Patois, the language of the community, was cemented as something undesirable, improper, and “broken.” It is because of these things that Miss Lou’s work was so radical, and so necessary.

In her 1944 poem “Bans O’Killing,” Miss Lou speaks to a figure intent on “killing” the dialect of Jamaican patois, and illuminates the fact that so-called “proper English” consists of many dialects itself. Invalidating Jamaican patois while celebrating Cockney slang or Irish brogue was simply a way of centering the superiority of whiteness, and Miss Lou did not shy away from making her audience confront those beliefs. “Formerly colonized spaces are automatically seen as backwards or primitive or regressive. But Jamaicans like Miss Lou were going back into Jamaica's history to find something worth celebrating or being proud of,” says Gaynair.


Miss Lou’s work explicitly focused on instilling pride in Jamaican culture, folklore, and language. Her method of writing, speaking, teaching, and performing in patois was intentional and unapologetic. In the face of her critics she pressed on, becoming one of the Caribbean’s strongest advocates for the rejection of colonial thinking and investment in cultural pride. Miss Lou’s influence is in the background of conversations defending Rihanna while music critics call her dancehall-tinged single “Work” gibberish. Her upliftment of Afro-Jamaican patois and culture is reflected similarly in discussions of the nuances of AAVE and Black American culture, linking with the literary expressions of noted authors like Zora Neale Hurston. Her presence inspired and continues to inspire others to embrace the essence of who they are, motivating us to “walk good,” as she often said as a farewell.

Miss Lou described her motivations by saying:

Some thought Jamaican-English was vulgar, out-of-order language. It came out of the African heritage and at that time anything African was bad: hair, colour, skin, language, music. But I thought it was fascinating. Everything had a rhythm. It was a creation of the people. One reason I persisted in writing in dialect in spite of the opposition was because nobody else was doing so, and there was such a rich material in dialect that I felt I wanted to put on paper some of the wonderful things that people say in dialect. You could never say 'look here' as vividly as 'kuyah.'

Richness. Rhythm. Creation. Uniqueness. Strength. These are pieces of what makes Blackness great, and parts of what made Miss Lou tell us to be proud of “fi wi language.”


Bee Quammie is a Toronto-based health care professional, writer, and founder of ‘83 To Infinity and The Brown Suga Mama. Recognized by Black Enterprise & the Black Canadians Awards for her digital work, Bee aims to live '83 To Infinity's motto: "It's never too late to learn something new, do something new, or be someone new." Follow her on Twitter at @beequammie.

by Anna Gibson

I’ve always considered myself “woke.” I’m an avid reader of history and because of this, I became aware of the forces that oppress black and brown people at a very young age. My parents introduced me to books like Introduction to African Civilization by John J. Jackson and From Babylon to Timbuktu by Rudolph R. Windsor when I was just ten years old. I thrived on the information I found in these books. However, at some point, I lost my way, and I can’t say that life in my teens and early 20’s was a reflection of the ideas I learned back then.


I decided to dive back into what it truly means to be conscious in the past six months. I’ve devoured books like When the World Was Black by Dr. Supreme Understanding and Maat: Guided Principles to Moral Living by KMT University Press. It’s like I’m a kid again. I can’t stop reading about my history and speaking to people of like minds who are interested in eradicating racism and all its subsequent effects on our people and our communities.

However, I was hurt by what I found in many of the major texts of the conscious community. Much of the community didn’t seem to accept me as a lesbian woman and would regulate my black womanhood to a secondary role within the movement. Many men in the “conscious” BLM community are masterful at hiding deep-seated homophobia and misogyny behind their “concern for the state of the black family,” avoidance of the “effeminization of the black man,” and protecting their “Queens” at all costs.

On the contrary, what I’ve found is that men in the BLM movement only define me as a queen when I fit into their narrow idea of femininity. They only find me respectable if I maintain a standard they can control. I’ve found myself in a number of perplexing situations. One brother practiced polygamy, but the moment one of his wives decided to get another lover she was a whore, simply for doing the same thing he did. I’ve been told I needed “correction,” as though I were a child who is disgraceful and completely out of line because I’m attracted to women. I’ve been dismissed, disregarded, and held in contempt. I’ve been judged and told I need to repent by the same individuals who claim that black and brown people need to throw off the religion of their slave masters and embrace who they truly are.

As this clip from Umar Johnson demonstrates, many of the foremost leaders of the black community would attempt to prove that we (women and the LGBTQIA community) hate the opposite sex for being who we are. Johnson often speaks about “treating” people in the LGBTQIA community as if we have a disease. He also makes hateful comments toward single black mothers, saying that they “castrate black boys and wonder why they grow into gay men.”

However, despite his rampant homophobia and misogyny he claims to love all African American people. This fear lies in the inability to understand the contributions that LGBTQIA people and black women have made to the civil rights and black power movements.

An interesting dynamic reveals the origins of misogyny and homophobia in the community. It illuminates a deep-seated fear of black men in the “conscious” community. I think Dr. Umar’s comments against single mothers and lesbians reflect a question that seems to be implied in black male anger against black women: What about me?

You see this question in many forms in the black conscious community, whether you hear about black men disparaging trans women, black men condemning lesbians, or black men hating gay men. A man is hated if he “behaves like a woman,” on one hand, but if a woman isn’t “his” it also becomes a serious problem. This is an issue of ownership and contempt, both of which serve as the foundation for misogyny, and the rejection of the LGBTQIA conscious community. This hatred is what’s REALLY meant in some of this discourse when we hear “Black women NEED black men,” and why men feel rejected enough to feel castrated when they aren’t involved.

If you need an example of this misogyny all you need to do check out articles on For Harriet’s comment threads, specifically the ones about LGBTQIA issues and love. You’ll see that while many men are completely silent about articles on the deaths of black women, they will come up at arms when conversations around LGBTQIA love and identity are centered and the discussion isn’t about them.

Dr. Umar Johnson’s misogyny and homophobia isn’t an isolated case. The issue is much bigger than him. The truth is, you can’t be concerned with the freedom of our people from oppression while excluding a large portion of our people. Black Lives Matter explicitly means that ALL black lives matter. If you throw out any portion of our people based on fear and ignorance, YOU don’t belong in the movement. For years LGBTQIA people have fought for have our freedom from the labyrinth of structural racism, and we will continue to do so because people of the Black diaspora need us.

Because of the ignorance outlined above, it’s understandable that many LGBTQIA people and women (God forbid if you’re both) may enter the Black Lives Matter movement and feel attacked on all sides. This is incredibly damaging, because quite frankly, we love our people and want to make sure they know who they are and how much of a powerful impact they can have on the world. I know how easy it is to become discouraged. You shouldn’t internalize misogyny or homophobia. Instead we should take time out to understand the common arguments against women and LGBTQIA community as well as further outline the origins of homophobia and misogyny within the movement.

People in BLM claim that the LGBTQIA conscious community are a “danger to BLM” and promote “black genocide.” On the contrary, I would posit that our unity can only be a danger the very establishment that oppresses us. The civil rights and black power movements didn’t collapse just because they gave LGBTQIA people a platform. LGBTQIA inclusion actually strengthened us. This can be proven by taking a look at some of the elders that helped place black liberation at the forefront of America’s consciousness.

Bayard Rustin was a prominent organizer that helped organize many of the events that made Dr. King’s platform possible. He was the mind behind the March on Washington and many of the sit-ins that occurred in the 1960’s civil rights movement. He wasn’t in the closet either. In an era that openly criminalized the LGBTQIA community and shunned women, he openly advocated for the rights of both. That level of fearlessness and tenacity in the face of adversity is exactly what we need in the BLM movement.

Angela Davis also strongly influenced the black power movement, and in 1995 she confirmed the rumors that she was a lesbian. To this day, she does lectures at college campuses, and has an impressive body of work that establishes her contributions to the Black Power Movement.

Some would claim that others would have come along and done the same thing if these powerful men and women didn’t, but this is a logical fallacy. We can’t deal with what could have been, since it didn’t happen. It can’t be denied that the elders I just mentioned—and many others—made extensive contributions to the movement, and we wouldn’t be where we are without their influence. If we’d rejected them on the basis of sexual orientation, identity, or gender, we would be missing out on a huge aspect of the liberation of our people.


Our ancestor Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, offers us insight into the primary insecurities that drive most “conscious men”. In his speech, “A Letter to the Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters About The Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements,” he states:

We should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion, whatever your insecurities are. I say ‘whatever your insecurities are’ because as we very well know, sometimes our first instinct is to want to hit a homosexual in the mouth, and want a woman to be quiet. We want to hit a homosexual in the mouth because we are afraid that we might be homosexual; and we want to hit the woman or shut her up because we are afraid that she might castrate us, or take the nuts that we might not have to start with. 

We must gain security in ourselves and therefore have respect and feelings for all oppressed people. We must not use the racist attitude that the White racists use against our people because they are Black and poor.

Newton was one of the few people in the Black Power Movement that openly reflected on its homophobia and misogyny. He even went as far as recognizing his own bias in the same speech and recognizing that rejecting us will do more harm than good.

In short, I would urge many members of the BLM movement to take an honest appraisal as to why they feel so threatened by the LGBTQIA and feminist communities, as Newton did. You aren’t protecting the conscious community. Instead, you’re wasting valuable time and energy rejecting a part of our people who contribute gems to black liberation and perpetuating the same cycles of oppression that holds us back as a people.

To my LGBTQIA brothers and sisters, let the track records of our elders speak for themselves and empower you to further action. You have a place in the BLM movement, even if you’re ridiculed for being who you are and loving who you love. Continue to lead our people to liberation and serve as an example to our brothers and sisters in the movement. Let it be known that unity is the key to success, and division will only lead to failure in the struggle against white supremacy.

Photo: Shutterstock

Anna Gibson is a student at Wayne State University who’s currently immersed in African Studies. You can catch up with her on Twitter @TheRealSankofa or on Facebook where she’s hiding in plain sight.

by Gabrielle Clark

It is within the context of Black feminist spaces that I found language to articulate the deeper politics of being black and being a woman. But as a human being who is always changing, no label fits my resistance quite right…

Black feminism and womanism are two blooms stemming from the rich soil of Black Women’s Thought. Two distinct manifestations of Black women’s lived experiences, intellectual and community work. They share important tasks, including collecting the undervalued philosophy of our maternal ancestors and giving space to empower ourselves by centering Black women’s thought in our lives. Although these schools of thought both spring from the same source and share a goal of liberation for Black people and all beings -- they differ in their methods of unpacking the oppression that follows being black and a woman at the same time. Still, there are other important things to consider when engaging Black women’s philosophy than distinguishing one theory from the other. More importantly is acknowledging that black women face inferior conditions because we live in a society that dehumanizes blackness, womanness and queerness. Due to this imbalance of power, there is a deep need for Black women’s philosophy. Also important is recognizing that the existence of multiple modes of Black women’s thought mirrors the sheer diversity in our lived experiences. When we look to Black women’s theory, we must pay attention to the places where the ideologies overlap; there we find the heartspace of black women’s wisdom about liberation.


Rooted in Resistance
The Black feminist is a warrior resisting structural racism and misogynoir- not only in practice, but uprooting very the logics that justify its existence. For her, racism is not theory; racism is marked by frequent events that never allow her to forget her Blackness. Beyond that, she recognizes the link between her individual experiences and those of other Black women. When she looks at the world around her, she notices that Black people, her people, have to survive inferior conditions and she is at the bottom of the pecking order. She acknowledges the way Black men access power through male privilege and how this impacts her personal relationships. Her philosophy is bold and rooted in resistance, like she is.

Womanist is to Feminist as Purple is to Lavender
Centering the experiences, needs and thoughts of Black Women, womanism stands as a philosophy all its own. The womanist is a whole human being that centers herself, loves other women (sexually and/or not) and recognizes her interdependence with men and the larger community. She is intuitive and honors Spirit. Likewise, her philosophy is intuitive, inspired in its fluidness and ambiguity. She is futuristic in her optimism, knowing she can help restore her community to balance. The womanist explores the positive aspects of black life, love and thought.

Alice Walker’s womanism situates itself in a positive dialectic with Black Feminism. By defining womanism as “A black feminist or feminist of color,” she creates a fluid relationship between the philosophies that allows an exchange of thought. This statement centers the importance of Black Women’s existing philosophy to the foundation of the womanist space. When Walker states “womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender,” she highlights the relationship between the two by using the same color family. A deeper hue than lavender, the color purple may represent deeper thought, a sharpening in perspective that allows for a richer theory.



The Power of Black Women’s Thought
I get it. Identifying as a Black feminist may be uncomfortable for some Black women. The word “feminism” has been dirtied by white mainstream society and is held in contempt in the black community. Now it smacks of male-bashing, bra-burning and white women struggling to achieve a more powerful place in the colonized world order- with or without their men. We don’t necessarily want to be attached to the politics of white women who were and continue to be complicit in our oppression. We have been ignored, abused and misunderstood by white feminists who do not want to learn how our struggle is more nuanced than their own. Despite creating a distinct space for Black women’s thought, there is a misconception that Black feminist thought is a byproduct of white feminism.

by Kimberly Foster @KimberlyNFoster




Photo: OWN

Kimberly Foster is the founder and editor-in-chief of For Harriet. Email or Follow @KimberlyNFoster

Dr. Cynthia McKinney knows what it means to sacrifice everything to pursue justice in a corrupt political system. The former congresswoman was the first Black woman to be elected to the House of Representatives from the state of Georgia. During her six terms in office, she developed a reputation for calling into question Republican overreaches of power. In 2006, she introduced articles of impeachment against George W. Bush for his role in the invasion of Iraq. Her outspokenness, of course, made her a target.

Republicans funded a Black woman challenger who defeated her in a primary in 2002. Mckinney returned to congress in 2004 but was defeated soon after. Upon leaving the Democratic party in 2007, McKinney pursued a presidential run as the Green Party candidate in 2008. Her historic run was overshadowed by the rise of Barack Obama.

McKinney says she has no regrets for her career built on outspokenness in a world that seeks to disregard Black women's voices, "I'm writing my legacy every day, because I'm living it. I just expect that people will disregard what other people say and look directly at what I have to say."

By phone from her new home in Bangladesh, Dr. McKinney spoke to editor-in-chief, Kimberly Foster, about the presidential race and the hamster wheel of electoral politics Black voters can't seem to escape.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

For Harriet: I wanted to go back to 2008 for a little bit. You were the Green Party candidate for president, and your nomination wasn't really talked about, specifically in black media. It seems like you were almost neglected in favor of now President Obama. Did you get that feeling back then? If so, what did you think about it?

McKinney: You don't have to do a content analysis to understand that there's very little that's being written about your candidacy. Of course, that's not just from the black media. That was from any media. I think it stemmed, in large part, from a recognition of where the black electorate was at that time and currently is. Unfortunately, there are certain limitations with the way black people vote. Those limitations eventually end up resulting in a policy that is detrimental to the black community.

All I can do is offer the opportunity for a behavior change. What really has to be done in order to encourage and foster the behavior change is for people to understand internally and almost viscerally that the current situation is a result of doing things, or business as usual. Therefore, I did what I could do, and it's up to the rest of the community to do what it can do in order to improve our collective situation.

For Harriet: Your nomination was historic. You Rosa Clemente on the ballot as well. Do you think the fact that you were two black women impacted the way that your candidacy was covered or embraced even by the political left?

McKinney: I think it had less to do with us. Many of the people that I knew very well and worked with and that Rosa knew very well and had worked with basically turned their backs on our candidacy. Even though they understood exactly who we were and what we stood for, instead they embraced a candidate about which they knew very little, and in many cases nothing at all, and [were] going with a party that just a few weeks earlier they were willing to walk away from.

It's not a secret that there was a lot of angst in the black community in 2006, 2007 around the failure, quite frankly, of the Democratic Party to do anything to change the material conditions inside the black community. This is a party that has consistently received 90 percent, and more, of the black vote. Even if we look on a local level, we can look at the statistics that have come from Loyola University and around the situation of the racial disparities in the city of Chicago. Chicago has always been the place of Democratic Party machines. If the Democratic Party was going to function for anybody, it should function for the black community in the city of Chicago.


Then, to go over to the city of New York. You look at New York City and at that time, New York Times had done a study. It looked at young black men, or black males period, between the ages of 25 and 60, I believe. What it found was nearly half of all the black men were unemployed. You can't have a headline like that in the New York Times without some political consequence. You would think at some point that, if nobody else, black people would say, "We demand that there be a public policy change to rectify this situation." Yet, the voting behavior largely remained the same.

We can even go back to 2005 with Hurricane Katrina. It was a generalized sense of outrage at what had happened in Katrina.We can go incident after incident after incident. One of the things that did come to my attention after Hurricane Katrina, though, was a document that was sent to me by Amefika Geuka.  That document said that the way that we can change our behavior so that we are not victimized by politics, so that we become the stewards of our own resources and our own future, was the by recruiting 1,000,000 conscious, black, independent voters. That would entail black voters delisting themselves as adherents of their Democratic or Republican party and then listing themselves as Independent, with a platform for which to vote. Which is back to what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was talking about. Not just the right to vote, but the responsibility, also, to have something for which to vote. With a platform that spells out very clearly what the priorities and the values of these 1,000,000 independent, black, conscious voters are, then those voters would be able to have tremendous say in a national election.

In fact, now I learned that Amefika has actually crystallized his idea that was sent to me that I found totally, absolutely brilliant. Now they are working on a voter registration plan that targets black voters who basically are unregistered in various states, primarily in the south, because that's where you have a lot of unregistered black voters. The goal is to then get them to participate in the political process, but not as business as usual.

I couple Amefika's efforts with that of Dr. Baruti, who is in St. Louis, Missouri. What he has done in 2016 is put together what he calls a National Black Political Conference. What he is trying to do is recruit out of the ordinary black candidates to run for office, to run for Congress and the Executive offices of the various states. If you put these two separate and, at this point, unjoined efforts together, imagine what could happen. That is the project that I would love to be involved in in this election season.

We don't need to be talking about, "Are we going to support Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders?" We need to be talking about, "What is it that we can do, what is our platform, and how we will call the Democrats, the Republicans, the Independents, the Greens, whoever, to support our agenda?" Stop this business of supporting somebody else's agenda, making them rich, fat and famous, and then we continue to suffer.

Back to a CNN study that was done in 2006, I think. What CNN did was they looked at the black votes and they separated the black vote out of Senate campaigns. What they found was that the Democrats had won the Senate majority because, solely attributable to, the black vote. With that kind of recognition of our power, what is it that we got in 2007 as the new Senate, with a Democratic majority, was convened? Quite literally, you got nothing.

The nothingness is born out in a study that was done by United for a Fair Economy, which is one of my favorite organizations. They do economic analyses of the racial disparities that exist in the United States, and they do that every year. They make the publication available on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. It was United for a Fair Economy that found that while the black community voted in the blue; unfortunately, their finances remained in the red.

I think we've got enough statistics about our situation, but what we don't have is, for some reason, the ability to change the behavior of voters, such that they vote in their own best interests, and not in the best interest of a political party.

For Harriet: Is there reason to believe that black people in the United States en masse will ever move away from the Democratic Party?

McKinney: You can remain hopeful, but it's not just the case of independent voting that is required. It's a critical analysis of our vote, so that we are critically informed before we cast a vote. This is something that, unfortunately, has not been preached. The documentary about my own political life, American Blackout, begins with a quote from Malcolm X that says that the white vote is so evenly divided that it's the black vote that can determine who sits in the doghouse or who goes to the white house. That was back in the 1960s that we have known this, but for some reason the political behavior has yet to substantially change.

For Harriet: Let's go back to the point about political loyalty. Hillary Clinton still has incredible support among black people, and I say, "Still." Its never left. Support for the Clintons, honestly, has not waned, despite the fact that she and her husband are tied to policies that have been catastrophic for black communities. Why do you think that is?

McKinney: Honestly, I can't explain the dysfunctional behavior, which I described earlier. As far as I'm concerned, there probably have been lots of political science research projects around what it is about political party labeling. It's not just the black communities, or black people, that are so afflicted. You have the same situation pertains to white voters as well.

In fact, I remember reading a study that was done in Sweden. That study found that people in Sweden take their political party label as a kind of tribalism, so it becomes embedded in their identities. In order to shake a particular belief system or one's idea about one's identity, one has to be presented with a disorienting dilemma. You would think that the living conditions are disorienting dilemma enough. I remember posting on my Facebook page, Cynthia McKinney Official, that Hillary was requesting ... I think it was $300,000 from a public university for a speaking engagement. Her most vociferous defenders were black people who were saying, "She has a right to make a living," totally missing the point.

If we look at what has happened in Libya today, that is solely attributed both to the leadership of the Secretary of State at the time and, of course, President Obama's administration in general. I have to wonder, is that what it takes in order to secure black support? You destroy an African country? If that's not enough, you look at the current fiasco that's going on in Haiti right now, literally as we speak. With the Haitian people rebelling.

With the 2010 presidential elections, where Hillary herself intervened in the election and said, "Oh, no. You can't have that person as your president, because he's too close to Hugo Chavez." Now, what's going on in Haiti is that the election that was stolen from the Haitian people in 2010,  now the Clintons are intervening again in order to ensure that, for example, Hillary Clinton's brother, who was awarded a gold mine in Haiti, so that the ill-gotten gains can remain.

Is this kind of behavior to be rewarded by black folks?

For Harriet: You mentioned Libya and Haiti. I imagine that those countries, despite the fact that they are black, don't rank very highly on the concern of the average black voter's agenda.

McKinney: Yet another dysfunction for those of us in the US.

For Harriet: Let's get to Obama. What's your assessment of his presidency?

McKinney: Stark silence.

For Harriet: Okay. Many have expressed disappointment, many have been very disappointed in the president's posture toward black America in the speeches that he delivers, not only in black spaces, but also nationally, on national platforms. Do you have any thoughts about his neglect or refusal to engage with the conditions, specifically, of black people in America, in the United States?

McKinney: That was to be expected if one had done one's homework prior to casting a vote. I knew that. I knew what was going to happen, so I'm not disappointed. I'm only disappointed in the fact that the damage that has been done to black America is probably irreversible.

I travel around the world quite often, and there was a time when I could travel anywhere to any country at any time, and as a black American, I was looked up to. Not only because of the culture that black America is known for, but also I was looked up to because it was clearly understood that the policies of the United States went against the interests of black America, and black America spoke out against those policies. Now, you've got, since the advent of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, Susan Rice, and now at the seat of the power, President Barack Obama, you've got these policies that are detrimental to people of color around the world now being carried out in blackface. It's very sad.

For Harriet: Michael Eric Dyson argued in a piece for The New Republic that Hillary Clinton would be more willing to address, specifically, the needs of black America than President Obama. What's your assessment of that?

McKinney: If you're going to listen to the people who told you to vote for President Obama, and now they've got buyer's remorse, the first thing you need to do is figure out, "Well, I need to listen to some different people now."

For Harriet: Fair. Very fair. Bernie Sanders has emerged really, I think, unexpectedly and he's positioned himself as the anti-establishment candidate. Is that a fair description of his position?

McKinney: Well, he's not anti-war, and his pronouncement about the bankers, a pronouncement that I myself have made, and his observations are, I believe, right on point in many instances. However, there's one gaping hole. That is, all of those war-funding bills and bills to authorize war, bills to fund war, and the bills to support Israel at the time of its bombing of Gaza. Those bills in particular, the last ones that I'm discussing, passed with unanimous support in the Senate.

For Harriet: He also has said on record that he does not support reparations. There's been plenty of back and forth about his stance and Ta-Nehisi Coates has weighed in a couple of times for The Atlantic. What should we make of his lack of support for that particular potential set of policies?

McKinney: Black people don't support reparations, so how are you going to expect somebody to support something you don't support for your own self? I've been trying to get money and the justice for black farmers that they deserve. I was the one. It was my legislation that even produced the disparity study that allowed the black farmers to have a legal leg to stand on and that forced the USDA, that at the time had Mike Espy as the Secretary of Agriculture.

This is talking about putting your pieces on the political chessboard, and then moving them so as to benefit the community. That is exactly what was done with Mike Espy. Mike Espy was a fantastic Secretary of Agriculture, but the moment the issue of the black farmers came up and he supported it by having a reputable company perform the disparity study and the findings that came out, then he was moved out on football tickets. He accepted football tickets, so he had to resign his position as Secretary of Agriculture. You're right, he should not have taken the football tickets. Okay. However, there's a whole lot worse corruption going on in Washington, DC.

We lost a critically important advocate, and the black farmers are losing their farms right now. We [have] only one and a half million acres in the United States. The totality of the United States owned by black people. The black farmers have the most pristine virgin soil, because they were denied access to loans so they could buy the chemicals. Now, the state is moving in on their farms because that's the best soil left. We just had a farmer foreclosed on a few weeks ago. The black farmer situation has not been settled, and black people don't care about that either, or else we would be organizing around it. Lord knows I have tried.

For Harriet: Do you think that you can be a radical politician, or that you can really call yourself a radical or a leftist politician and not support reparations?

McKinney: I think you could probably say you are the best politician around if you can get away with saying as little as possible about anything that really matters and you can still win. That is a good politician.

For Harriet: All right. The Black Lives Matter movement has been impossible to ignore over the past year or so. They forced the Democratic candidates to at least pay lip service to their issues and their concerns. They've been able to create spectacles around their organizing, and I do not mean spectacle in a pejorative sense. I mean that they've been able to ... They know how to get on TV, right? They know how to trend on social media. Is there any incentive for the candidates who have paid lip service to Black Lives Matter during the campaign trail to actually keep those promises when they're in office?

McKinney: That's up to the black community. If the black community is not going to prioritize its own interests, then nothing will ever change. The black community has to prioritize its own interests. I wish I had this quote right now from ... I think it was August Wilson who made a quote about if you are not prepared to make your issue the most important political issue and you're not prepared to carry it all the way through to the very end by acting on that issue as if it is your priority issue, then it won't be anybody else's priority issue. You will lose.

The issue is, I absolutely love what Black Lives Matter have done. I love what they have done. For the way black people are treated, and not just black people, but a whole host of people. The 99 percent. The country should not be allowed to go back to business as usual, because business as usual is actually hurting a lot of people. When we interrupt business as usual, that's when you get attention, and that's when your issues become mainstream. When you are able to stop business as usual.
I have people who have been trying to get me to support, which I do support, a general strike across the US, where folks just take a day off. We'll let the one percent, which is actually the one-tenth of one percent, maybe even fewer than that ... We'll let them see what life is like without us. The Latinos did that several years ago, which I thought was extremely effective. The politics of dissent, we have only scratched the surface of what is possible.

For Harriet: Does it feel like there is a growing momentum around the interests of black people? Is Black Lives Matter just the beginning?

McKinney: Well, I certainly hope so. I hope that 1,000,000 conscious, black voters is just the beginning and that they achieve their goal of finding 1,000,000 blacks to register and adhere to a political platform that is drawn up by them, created by them and in the end, exercised by them. I hope that Zaki Baruti's National Black Political Conference is successful in recruiting average, ordinary black people like you to run for office and offer themselves as candidates, so that we get out of this professional trickster who is able to say one thing and do another, and then give you justification for why he didn't do your thing when he got elected. He or she.

For Harriet: I know quite a few black people, and I say, "Black people," because those are the people I care about, who choose to abstain from electoral politics because they do not trust the system. Is that a tenable position?

McKinney: When you hear me say, "Don't vote," then you know all hope is lost. I have not yet lost hope, even though I am extremely disgruntled and disappointed in many respects at our political positioning. This is something that we have to take care of ourselves. For example, in Chicago [with] Rahm Emanuel. I advised the Chicagoans who asked me to not vote for Rahm Emanuel for mayor, because I understood who Rahm Emanuel was and is. Rahm Emanuel, in his first mayoral election, carried every black precinct. Can you imagine? Every black precinct.

McKinney: Yeah. You had the same thing happen in California, as well. Then Rahm was running the second time, [and] there was an opportunity for a black-brown coalition. That opportunity just evaporated because black people went and voted for Rahm Emanuel again, instead of voting for their own power. The same thing happened in California when the issue was...Can't remember his name, but he was the governor of California.

For Harriet: Gray Davis.

McKinney: Gray Davis. That's right. The lieutenant governor was Cruz Bustamante. What should have happened was that blacks should have supported Cruz Bustamante, and then we would have had Cruz as the first Latino governor of California. More than that, the important thing would have been that a new political coalition would've been created. That political coalition was able to seize power and then benefit itself, the same people who had been left out of California politics since the beginning, but the coalition never happened.

The opportunity for us to see ourselves as drivers of our own destiny, as creators of a new set of political circumstances, that is the identity that we have to hold on to. We've got to grab it. It's never going to happen for us if we continue to ask other people to give us a little tidbit here and there, which is what we are doing now.

For Harriet: Is a free and fair election possible in the current system?

McKinney: I think it's possible if we keep our eyes on the system. We have to monitor that system. Of course, we've got electronic voting machines. I am one who has been victimized by the pre-programming of the electronic voting machines. People all over the state of Georgia were voting in our election, and when we asked, "Let's see the election data," because we wanted to see how those votes were cast coming from outside of my congressional district, how they were counted, we had to file a lawsuit in order to gain access. Then, after we filed the lawsuit, the state said, "You can't have the election data, because that's owned by Diebold," which was the company that created the machines. Then, the state's expert witness just testified and said, "The only recompense that you have is that you have to accept that whoever we say is the winner, is actually the winner."

With that, the lawsuit was over and we couldn't raise any more money. We raised about $20,000 that got us through the filing stage, it got us expert witnesses. We were able to fly them up. The bottom line was, we couldn't appeal the judgement and we lost. Now, citizens of the state of Georgia do not have access to election data. They have to rely on the voracity of the election officials announcing, truly, who represented the will of the people in the election. It's up to state authorities and Diebold to make that determination, and the announcement.

For Harriet: This is a point that was really underscored in the documentary about you, American Blackout. It kind of seems like what you're saying, is things are rigged, but it's our duty to fight, as Assata would say. Is that a fair characterization?

McKinney: Yes, and we can follow the system/ Of course, you're not going to get media coverage, because the media are working ... You just have to remember Operation Mockingbird and The Mighty Wurlitzer. If you go back to the Frank Church Committee report. You know that thousands of journalists and publishing houses and newspapers and other publications were on the payroll of the CIA. It was illegal, but it was done. Now, we have this activity switched over to the Office of Perception Management that's housed in the Pentagon, so nothing has really changed.

One of the things that, we also have to do is be discerning enough to understand that if one person gets positive press, we shouldn't run up behind that person and say, "Oh, will you be our leader?" We must understand the reason that a particular political personality is getting negative press, or no press at all. There's a reason for it.

I do believe [that] if we just suit up a team and have confidence that our coach and the referees are not actually being paid from the other side, we can win in the game of politics. We have won before. The reason we won before is because we had authentic leaders, we had followers, we had people who were smart enough, and discerning enough to understand that no matter how badly reputed an individual was, if that person was operating in our best interests, then that person was qualified to be a leader for us. Not just because they're in the bought and paid for media. If we reenact the ways and update those ways with the technology that we have access to today, we can win. Of that, I am absolutely certain.

For Harriet: Do you have any ideas about how we can organize against all of the money in politics in this post-Citizens United world?

McKinney: You know the Montgomery bus boycott?

For Harriet: Mm-hmm 

McKinney: People didn't have a whole lot of money back then, did they? What they had was a sense of community, so they used the sense of community and they used the sense that it may not be better for me, but I'm going to make it better for my children. Instead of riding the bus, they walked. They sacrificed, and they won. That's how I am absolutely certain that we can take whatever it is we have. We can take what we have and we can work a miracle with what we have, but we've got to be willing to sacrifice. We've got to be willing to talk to each other. We've got to be willing to understand that we are a community, and that we need to be a community.

Now, young people don't even look at each other in the face, in the eye, and greet each other. I force young people. I acknowledge them first of all, because I acknowledge their humanity. I acknowledge their dignity. Even when their pants are hanging down and I don't want to see what I see, I tell them, "You need to pull up your pants, because I don't want to see that." By acknowledging each other, we acknowledge our own dignity. We re-affirm our own dignity. If you look away when you see another black person now, what is that? Where does that come from? If that's the kind of community that we have, then we have no community at all.