AfroCentricity, Sisterhood and African Feminisms: An African Woman’s Standpoint in Black Feminist Thought

*African Women: Women in Africa and the African Diaspora

Everyone that’s ever been to Africa writes about African women, but rarely do we see African women become storytellers of their own…

The Necessity of Black Women’s Standpoint and Intersectionality in Environmental Movements

“The male leaders / of Earth / appear to have abandoned / their very senses … / They murder humans / and mountains / every day /they are in office / and never seem to notice…

Ma Rainey’s Black Feminist Claiming of Her Sexuality

Ma Rainey, considered the mother of blues in many ways birthed a black female sexuality that is…

“From God and a Woman”: Black Feminist Theology, from Biblical Feminism to Womanism

Hood Bitch: A Black Feminist Framework for Understanding the Power and Resistance of Cardi B.

Misty Copeland and the White World of Classical Ballet

Carefree Black Boys: The Reconstruction of Black Masculinity

The work of black feminist thought seeks to create spaces where the most marginalized voices are raised and validated. Black feminism seeks to break down systems that actively oppress black women, and the work that she does…

Appreciation and Appropriation of Black Gospel Music

Music is frequently considered one of the great unifiers of people from all over the world. It has the power to bring people together and communicate across language barriers, but these statements overestimate this unity by neglecting…

Rihanna: Erotic Violence and Third Wave Black Feminism

Suck My Dick: The Intentionally Hypersexualized Persona of Lil Kim

Lil Kim’s Use of The Erotic As An Embodiment of Black Feminism
By R Matthews

“Nigga FUCK YOU
(No, FUCK YOU BITCH)
Who you talking to?
(Why you actin’ like a BITCH?)…

Why is School So Boring?! 3 Ways Black Feminist Pedagogy Can Radically Improve Our Learning

I am currently immersed in a wildly exciting learning experience: AAAS/WGS 136: Black Feminist Thought with Professor Johnson at Brandeis University. The classroom is a haven…

Turn the Volume Up: The Forgotten Mothers of Rock ’N’ Roll

Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton was an artist that created a genre of music that was based on black female excellence and denying the crushing stereotypes that existed for those who lived at the intersection of race and gender in…

How can it be revolutionary if it’s racist? Racism and Black Women in the Woman Suffrage Movement

As bell hooks asserts in her piece “Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory,” feminism in the United States has never addressed the needs of those who “are the most victimized by sexist oppression.” [1] The woman suffrage movement…

Horizontal Leadership as Black Feminist Praxis

Leadership! That’s where one person tells everyone else what to do right? Well maybe sometimes… But there are plenty of ways of building power that are more nuanced and less understood than that. Horizontal leadership, also known as decentralized, nonhierarchical, shared, and…

Shonda Rhimes and Complex Black Women in Media

“I’m going to be totally honest with you, I completely deserve this. I have…

9 Practices of Black Feminism

that white women can employ

Black Women’s Standpoint and Prison Abolition

The knowledge produced through black women’s standpoint is uniquely positioned to illuminate the reality of what Michelle Alexander has called “the new Jim Crow”: a prison industrial complex that punishes blackness through heightened surveillance of so-called high crime — read…

Creating Authentic Black Feminist Theatrical Aesthetic

Theater allows experiences to be documented through text and performance, rather than merely theory. Lisa Anderson describes black feminist theater as the combination of “…playwrights, directors, performance artists and scholars who, intentionally or not, blend the core…

Tracing the Legacy of Slavery in Medicine

“In this era, institutionalized racism, the organization of medical care, and post-industrialism have intersected to undermine African-American health in new and complicated ways. Racism is embodied in a broad and complex cultural dynamic that erodes…

The (Black and Brown) People’s Climate Movement: Displacement in the Face of Climate Catastrophe

On September 21, 2014, I woke before sunrise, caught a bus to New York City, and joined approximately 400,000 people to march through the streets demanding climate…

Let Nicki Minaj Be Angry

Power of Smart Talk in Media

Last summer, the summer of 2015, MTV’s Video Music Awards (VMA) released the nominations for the Video of the Year award, revealing that Nicki Minaj’s Vevo record breaking “Anaconda” was not one of them. Upset…

“The Right to Turn My Face to the Wall”: Manifestations of Mental Ill-Health in Black Womanhood

Beyond Worker and Intellectual: A Historiography of Black Women in the Communist Movement

Black Girls Code: Subverting Sabotage

Transforming Digital Surveillance into Technological Empowerment

Why Black Women Must be at the Center of Deconstructing the New Jim Crow

Mass Incarcerations and its Effects on Black Motherhood

Race, Modernity, and Public Performance

In Dichotomies of reading ‘street poetry’ and ‘book poetry’, Kwame Dawes discusses a troubling dichotomy developing in the poetry world — street poetry versus book/published poetry. Street poetry is characterized by oral performance that is linked to poetic…

Black Women Getting the Word Out:

Publishing Black Literature and Black Women’s Narratives

Writing a narrative can serve as a form of validation — a record of experience, thought, and feeling. The process of writing a narrative, whether…

Bringing Digital Discourses to Classrooms:

Why and How Schools Need to Support Marginalized Students