they had always been here. every indigenous community massacred, every single prophet assassinated, every child sacrificed to colonialism, every slave rebel shackled in their grave, every unassigned body piled as refuse somewhere, had never disappeared. whatever part they burned into air, whatever part they buried underground, whatever part they threw in the sea, came whole again in every breathing growing thing, and when the warning time came they were all of them (all of them) screaming.

from M. Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

The quote above is what I have been saying forever to these men who have an issue with me being an outstanding leader of a woman… and it is refreshing to finally here it come from a man’s mouth.

It’s a lot of DUMMY men out here who truly think we should be following them as women when they are quite literally ignorant, lost, and mislead men... and they get mad at us and assassinate our womanhood the moment they realize we are MORE than them and we are more capable of leading ourselves and others in the proper directions exponentially more than they are. They are mad at us because we know better and are better than any and everything they are about & anything and everything they have to say or do. They are mad at us because they are less than the man they should be. They are mad at us, because even as women, we stand to be more equipped and capable than even them, as a man. You are not too strong woman, these men are too weak for you. These weak men are offended by you because EVERYTHING YOU ARE reminds them of what THEY ARE NOT… but yet are supposed to be as a man, but are not, because they are not proper or real men… and they seek to take their faults and insecurities out on you, and instead of admitting to themselves that they are shitty leaders, they accuse you of being too much of a leader for them to handle or like or want in a woman.

Something these weak men should know: We absolutely are submissive. We are just not submissive to anything DUMB WRONG OR WEIRD or whatever we know better than already. We submit to the men who are actually fit to lead women like us who already know how to lead ourselves properly and refuse to be led astray. If we know better than you we know better than you. If we are more equipped than you, we are more equipped! And we are not going to pretend like we are not just for your egos sake. Y’all mad at us because we are not about to submit to anything less than us or beneath us. And we do not follow behind any advice, statements, or commands that WE KNOW FAR BETTER THAN (and trust me we do know better than it and it’s confirmed that we do know better than it)…and we not about to pretend like we don’t just for your sake. We are not about to play dumb or follow blindly for anybody. Period.

Ladies, it’s time for us to realize that the only men that have issues with us are the ones who are BENEATH us. When you find a man who is ACTUALLY fit to lead you, he will have no issue with the incredibly strong leader you already are. In fact it will impress him and turn him on.

Hear this ladies, and say it with me: These weak men are the only ones who have an issue with you being strong. These dumb men are the only ones who have an issue with you being intelligent. These lost men are the only ones who have an issue with you having found yourself. These men who don’t know God properly are the only ones who have an issue with you knowing God and His words, more well and more accurately than they do. These men who are disconnected from God and can’t hear His voice are the only ones with an issue with what God has told YOU. These broke men are the only men who have an issue with you being rich. These talentless men are the only ones intimidated or jealous of your talent. These misled men are the only ones who have an issue with you being a proper leader. These loser men are the only ones with an issue with you being a winner. These men who ain’t going nowhere in life are the only ones who got an issue with where you are going in life. These unmanly men are the only ones that feel emasculated by you.

Continue to be a lioness Queen, soon your King will be in effect.

- The Modest Blog

“When feminists acknowledge in one breath that black women are victimized and in the same breath emphasize their strength, they imply that though black women are oppressed they manage to circumvent the damaging impact of oppression by being strong…Usually, when people talk about the “strength“ of black women they are referring to the way in which they perceive black women coping with oppression. They ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression…The tendency to romanticize the black female experience that began in the feminist movement was reflected in the culture as a whole. The stereotypical image of the “strong“ black woman was no longer seen as dehumanizing, it became the new badge of black female glory…Black women were told that we should find our dignity not in liberation from sexist oppression but in how well we could adjust, adapt, and cope…No one bothered to discuss the way in which sexism operates both independently and simultaneously with racism to oppress us…The stereotypical image of the black woman as strong and powerful so dominates the consciousness of most Americans that even if a black woman is clearly conforming to sexist notions of femininity and passivity she may be characterized as tough, domineering, and strong.” - bell hooks (ain’t I a woman: black women and feminism)

We might all die, but we do not all die under the same conditions.

Deborah E. McDowell, “Viewing the Remains: A Polemic on Death, Spectacle, and the [Black] Family,” in The Familial Gaze (1999)

La marginalità è un luogo radicale di possibilità, uno spazio di resistenza. Questa marginalità, che ho definito come spazialmente strategica per la produzione di un discorso contro-egemonico, è presente non solo nelle parole, ma anche nei modi di essere e di vivere. Non mi riferivo, quindi, a una marginalità che si spera di perdere – lasciare o abbandonare – via via che ci si avvicina al centro, ma piuttosto a un luogo in cui abitare, a cui restare attaccati e fedeli, perché di esso si nutre la nostra capacità di resistenza. Un luogo capace di offrirci la possibilità di una prospettiva radicale da cui guardare, creare, immaginare alternative e nuovi mondi.

bell hooks, da "Elogio del margine-Scrivere al buio".

"Above all else, Our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s may because of our need as human persons for autonomy. This may seem so obvious as to sound simplistic, but it is apparent that no other ostensibly progressive movement has ever consIdered our specific oppression as a priority or worked seriously for the ending of that oppression. Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g. mammy, matriarch, Sapphire, whore, bulldagger), let alone cataloguing the cruel, often murderous, treatment we receive, Indicates how little value has been placed upon our lives during four centuries of bondage in the Western hemisphere. We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work. "

The Combahee River Collective statement

There is no way for me to read a Bell Hooks book and just take out one good quote. I just wanna take a highlighter and color the whole damn book! Almost every sentence and thought from that woman is an automatic banger in the quotes for life living category!!

What’s wrong with White Feminism?

When I truly started becoming interested in the feminist movement, I noticed that women like the American suffragettes (especially Alice Paul) were being praised for their “groundbreaking”achievements.

However, there are things in the shadows that people rarely want to put to light about this movement. Through deep research, I found that there were black women who were interested in becoming apart of the National American Women Suffrage Association but were turned down.

Alice Paul, when planning the march, only imagined as rally filled with white women. In essence, the NAWSA gained voting rights for white women at the expense of the black ones.

How Can We Escape White Feminism’s Grip on the Movement?

A black civil rights advocate, Kimberlé Crenshaw, encourages women to partake in intersectionality. This means that within feminism we acknowledge the different factors that keeps a marginalized group, well, marginalized. For instance, white women only face gender inequality, while women of colour have to deal with racism and sexism and queer and trans women have to deal homophobia and transphobia along with sexism.

In order to free ourselves from the bondage of white feminism, we as feminists should acknowledge these differences within the movement so that we can tackle each marginalized group’s issue.

~TheFeministVoice

August 29, 2022.

we are the actual undead, too real for movies. we are the knowing and growing and small. we are the accumulated enunemerated squall. we are the rungs that punctuate the fall. we exist in a way you didn't know how to call. forth. until now. that's all.

from Dub: Finding Ceremony by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Image: Wangechi Mutu, 'You are my sunshine,' collage painting on paper, 24 x 36", 2015.

“Marginalized and oppressed people are linked to the status of their group and are less likely to be afforded individual status and insulation from the experiences of the groups with which they are identified. The political nature of [search engines] demonstrates how algorithms are a fundamental invention of computer scientists who are human beings–and code is a language full of meaning and applied in varying ways to different types of information” -Safiya Umoja Noble, "Algorithms of Oppression"

Before reading Safiya Umoja Noble’s “Algorithms of Oppression,” I was among the many that truly believed Google was a neutral public resource. Maybe you’ve heard the saying “library at your fingertips.”

However, despite popular belief, its algorithms serve paid advertising which happens to sport search results as a product of “most relevant and useful information” (Noble 37). Algorithms involve the process of “rendering,” a procedure that Noble calls “expressly social, economic, and human,” implemented through a series of steps called “algorithms” (37). The common misconception that Search is a mirror to human beliefs is combatted by Noble’s notion that “current algorithmic constraints [do] not provide appropriate social, historical, and contextual meaning to already overracialized and hypersexualized people who materially suffer along multiple axes” (36).

This means that for the white programmers who are uncomfortable talking about race, accurate depictions of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color escape the clutches of our everyday algorithms.

Furthermore, search engine optimization or SEO represents pushing ads or websites to the “top of a results list for a query,” providing profit to various companies or Google based on website clicks (Noble 40). Because Google is what Noble calls a “multinational advertising company,” it can prioritize search results for, say, “Black women” under a multitude of porn hyperlinks over the “eleven and a half billion documents that could have been indexed” (49).

Even someone such as Noble, who defines herself from the Black feminist perspective, a pedagogy that analyzes the intersection between racism, sexism, and so on, would find that search results do not always directly reflect her interests.

One quote that I would like to include, and that pulls away the smoke screen of “naturalized” algorithms, comes early on in the chapter, “Marginalized and oppressed people are linked to the status of their group and are less likely to be afforded individual status and insulation from the experiences of the groups with which they are identified. The political nature of [search engines] demonstrates how algorithms are a fundamental invention of computer scientists who are human beings–and code is a language full of meaning and applied in varying ways to different types of information” (Noble 26).

Edited: 5/2/2023

“Patriarchal power is the privilege of all men in our society regardless of their class or race.” - bell hooks (ain’t I a woman: black women and feminism)

In this incarnation, she appears in the archive of slavery as a dead girl named in a legal indictment against a slave ship captain tried for the murder of two Negro girls. But we could have as easily encountered her in a ship’s ledger in the tally of debits; or in an overseer’s journal—‘last night I laid with Dido on the ground’; or as an amorous bed-fellow with a purse so elastic ‘that it will contain the largest thing any gentleman can present her with’ in Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies; or as the paramour in the narrative of a mercenary soldier in Surinam; or as a brothel owner in a traveler’s account of the prostitutes of Barbados; or as a minor character in a nineteenth-century pornographic novel. Variously named Harriot, Phibba, Sara, Joanna, Rachel, Linda, and Sally, she is found everywhere in the Atlantic world. The barracoon, the hollow of the slave ship, the pest-house, the brothel, the cage, the surgeon’s laboratory, the prison, the cane-field, the kitchen, the master’s bedroom—turn out to be exactly the same place and in all of them she is called Venus.

—Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts” (2008)

“Working with men who wanted to know love, I advised them to think of it as a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.”

— bell hooks • The Will to Change : Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004)

black women have been grappling for decades with the fact that they organize with + live alongside + love men who are both given only conditional access to male privilege AND wield violent, structural power over them. they have generated libraries worth of compassionate theory which engages with the destructive impact of misogyny on men, the way in which being seen as a Real Man is conditional for marginalized ppl, the dangers of separatism + the importance of leaving nobody behind. these are not new ideas + they are absolutely necessary ideas for moving towards total liberation.

however, most foundational black feminist/intersectional feminist (in the tradition of angela davis) theorists have discussed these concepts without: minimizing or erasing the concept of misogyny, falling back on lesbophobic stereotypes (ugly man hating dykes!), repeating antifeminist propaganda (not all men!), abandoning a focus on structural power + material impact, engaging in bad faith identity politics which silo identities (tokenizing some while ignoring others, constructing weird hierarchies of which oppressions 'cancel each other out'), or individualizing oppression/identity/power (things which happen TO us + AROUND us, not within us).

respectfully, these theories of feminism which include + acknowledge men's pain are already happening- there's a reason those aren't the theories/practices you're exposed to. these theories often do lack trans voices, but you aren't adding our voices to these stories. you are creating a new theory of oppression built on a foundation + critique of white neoliberal feminism + based largely on anecdotal experiences in predominately white communities. you are replicating all of the flaws of white feminism.