Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  resisted formal structures of elitism in a number of ways that dovetail the kinds of radical political critique for which Baker calls. Baker also offers a paragraph of acknowledgment to Angela Davis, particularly her work on prison abolition, in the final chapter of Betrayal. But other than cursory gestures to the work of women like Davis and Tricia Rose, Black women are absent from Baker’s account of Black intellectual leadership in the twentieth century. Though Baker claims gender inclusivity in his use of the term race people, it is clear that he thinks race men have failed us and that a deliberate turn back to the race man model of the King era is the only thing that has the potential to save us. But Baker’s account of the problems in Black leadership say much more about the persistence and limitations of the politics of racial manhood in defining and mapping effective forms of Black leadership than they do about the actual state of Black leadership. The story shifts dramatically when we look toward the work of race women. In Beyond Respectability, I join with other scholars such as Erica Edwards in her book, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership, and Robert Patterson in his book, Exodus Politics: Civil Rights and Leadership in African American Literature and Culture, in calling for a sure end to the charismatic race man model of leadership with which folks like Baker, West, Gates, and others continue to enjoy a tortured romance. Edwards writes against a thoroughgoing Black community investment in charismatic male leaders, and Patterson argues that this investment informs a broad-based belief in “exodus politics,” a Black cultural paradigm rooted in the biblical Moses narrative which, “disallows the possibility of Black female leadership” and “produces a gender hierarchy that prioritizes black men, black men’s leadership, and black men’s political interests.” 11 By (re)turning to the figure of the race woman, Beyond Respectability interrogates the persisting cultural and gender narratives that continue to circumscribe Black women’s leadership possibilities within African American communities and the broader public sphere. I maintain that at the center of this debate is a kind of skepticism about Black women’s ability to be creative and broad thinkers about race issues. Certainly, Black women are viewed as committed, devoted, reliable, and dependable workers, but in the twenty-first century we still believe far too often that the thinking should be left up to men. Accounts like Baker’s engage in just the sort of Jane Crow politics that have shaped Black male intellectual practices and which Pauli Murray called out during her time as a law student at Howard University. Murray’s invocation of the term Jane Crow, which I excavate and examine in chapter three, offered a thorough and unrelenting critique of the kinds of sexist practices that shaped the vaunted male leadership class of the Civil Rights generation, the very leadership class that Baker uncritically supports.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  Their young men will die by the sword, their sons and their daughters will die by famine; 23 and there will be no remnant [of the conspirators] left, for I will bring disaster and horror on the men of Anathoth in the year of their punishment.” Jeremiah 12 Jeremiah’s Prayer 1 Y OU, O LORD are [uncompromisingly] righteous and consistently just when I plead my case with You; Yet let me discuss issues of justice with You: Why has the way of the wicked prospered? Why are those who deal in treachery (deceit) at ease and thriving? 2 You have planted them, they have also taken root; They grow, they have even produced fruit. You are a honored by their [hypocritical] lips But [You are] far from their heart and mind. 3 But You, O LORD , know me [and understand my devotion to You]; You see me; And You examine the attitude of my heart toward You. Drag out the faithless like sheep for the slaughter [O LORD ] And set them apart for the day of slaughter. 4 How long must the land mourn And the grass of the countryside wither? Because of the wickedness and hypocrisy of those who live in it, The beasts and the birds are consumed and are swept away [by the drought], Because men [mocking me] have said, “He will not [live long enough to] see [what happens at] our final end.” 5 [The LORD rebukes Jeremiah for his impatience, saying] “If you have raced with men on foot and they have tired you out, Then how can you compete with horses? If you fall down in a land of peace [where you feel secure], Then how will you do [among the lions] in the [flooded] thicket beside the Jordan? 6 “For even your [tribal] brothers and the household of your father, Even they have dealt treacherously (unfaithfully) with you; Indeed they are [like a pack of hounds] howling after you. Do not believe them, although they may say kind words and promise you good things.” God’s Answer 7 “I have abandoned My house, I have given up My [precious] inheritance (Judah); I have given the [dearly] beloved of My life Into the hands of her enemies. 8 “My inheritance has become to Me Like a lion in the forest; She has raised her voice and roared against Me; So I have come to [treat her as if I] hate her. 9 “Is My inheritance like a speckled bird of prey to Me [unlike the others]? Are the birds of prey (enemies) surrounding her on every side? Go, gather all the [wild] beasts of the field; Bring them to devour [her]! 10 “Many shepherds (invaders) have destroyed My vineyard (Judah), They have trampled My field underfoot; They have made My pleasant field A desolate wilderness. 11 “They have made it a wasteland, Desolate, it mourns before Me; The whole land has been made a wasteland, Because no man takes it to heart.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  9 “Who knows, God may turn [in compassion] and relent and withdraw His burning anger (judgment) so that we will not perish.” [Joel 2:13 , 14 ] 10 When God saw their deeds, that they turned from their wicked way, then God [had compassion and] relented concerning the disaster which He had declared that He would bring upon them. And He did not do it. Jonah 4 Jonah’s Displeasure Rebuked 1 B UT IT greatly displeased Jonah and he became angry. 2 He prayed to the LORD and said, “O LORD , is this not what I said when I was still in my country? That is why I ran to Tarshish, because I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and great in lovingkindness, and [when sinners turn to You] You revoke the [sentence of] disaster [against them]. [Ex 34:6 ] 3 “Therefore now, O LORD , just take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” 4 Then the LORD said, “Do you have a good reason to be angry?” 5 Then Jonah went out of the city and sat east of it. There he made himself a shelter and sat under its shade so that he could see what would happen in the city. 6 So the LORD God prepared a a plant and it grew up over Jonah, to be a shade over his head to spare him from discomfort. And Jonah was extremely happy about [the protection of] the plant. 7 But God prepared a worm when morning dawned the next day, and it attacked the plant and it withered. 8 When the sun came up God prepared a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on Jonah’s head so that he fainted and he wished to die, and said, “It is better for me to die than to live.” 9 Then God said to Jonah, “Do you have a good reason to be angry about [the loss of] the plant?” And he said, “I have a [very] good reason to be angry, angry enough to die!” 10 Then the LORD said, “You had compassion on the plant for which you did not work and which you did not cause to grow, which came up overnight and perished overnight. 11 “Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 [innocent] persons, who do not know the difference between their right and left hand [and are not yet accountable for sin], as well as many [blameless] animals?” Jonah 1 a 1:1 Jonah, the only prophet known to attempt to run away from a divinely appointed mission, lived during the time when Jeroboam II ruled Israel (the ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom). He was from the town of Gath-Hepher in Galilee. b 1:2 The city of Nineveh was the magnificent capital of the Assyrian Empire.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  4 Then the herald loudly proclaimed, “You are commanded, O peoples, nations, and speakers of every language, 5 that at the moment you hear the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon (four-stringed harp), dulcimer, bagpipe, and all kinds of music, you are to fall down and worship the golden image that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up. 6 “Whoever does not fall down and worship shall immediately be thrown into the midst of a furnace of blazing fire.” 7 So when the people heard the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, dulcimer, bagpipe and all kinds of music, all the peoples, nations, and speakers of every language fell down and worshiped the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar the king had set up. Worship of the Image Refused 8 At that time certain Chaldeans came forward and brought [malicious] accusations against the Jews. 9 They said to King Nebuchadnezzar, “O king, live forever! 10 “You, O king, have made a decree that everyone who hears the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, dulcimer, bagpipe, and all kinds of music is to fall down and worship the golden image. 11 “Whoever does not fall down and worship shall be thrown into the midst of a furnace of blazing fire. 12 “There are certain Jews whom you have appointed over the administration of the province of Babylon, namely Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego. These men, O king, pay no attention to you; they do not serve your gods or worship the golden image which you have set up.” 13 Then Nebuchadnezzar in a furious rage gave a command to bring Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego; and these men were brought before the king. 14 Nebuchadnezzar said to them, “Is it true, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, that you do not serve my gods or worship the golden image which I have set up? 15 “Now if you are ready, when you hear the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, dulcimer, and all kinds of music, to fall down and worship the image which I have made, very good. But if you do not worship, you shall be thrown at once into the midst of a furnace of blazing fire; and what god is there who can rescue you out of my hands?” 16 Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego answered the king, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to answer you on this point. 17 “If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to rescue us from the furnace of blazing fire, and He will rescue us from your hand, O king. 18 “But even if He does not, let it be known to you, O king, that we are not going to serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up!” [Job 13:15 ; Acts 4:19 , 20 ] Daniel’s Friends Protected 19 Then Nebuchadnezzar was filled with fury, and his facial expression changed toward Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  FIGURE 5. Pauli Murray. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University The function of Jane Crow on Howard’s campus further incensed and aggravated Murray because of the increasing commitment of Howard’s female students to lead desegregation efforts at home in solidarity with Black male soldiers who were fighting abroad. When Pauli’s friend Ruth Powell and three other Howard women were arrested on U Street for refusing to overpay for a cup of coffee, their actions galvanized the campus chapter of the NAACP. Murray’s women-centered account of the Howard desegregation campaign provides a direct challenge to the male-centered historiography that has dominated civil rights literature. Powell’s arrest undoubtedly reminded Murray of her own 1940 arrest in Petersburg. But Murray also personally felt an additional responsibility to “help make the country for which our Black brothers were fighting a freer place in which to live when they returned from wartime service” since it was merely “an accident of gender [that had] exempted me from military service and left me free to pursue my career.” 36 Murray’s “accident of gender,” loomed insistently in the background, creating a “dis-ease” that was exacerbated by the repeated encroachments of Jim Crow outside of Howard and Jane Crow inside of Howard. During the 1930s, Howard’s programs in humanities and social sciences housed the most prominent Black public intellectuals of the day, including economist Abram Harris, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, political scientist Ralph Bunche, philosopher Alain Locke, literary scholar Sterling Brown, and theologian Howard Thurman. 37 By the 1940s, Howard Law had taken up a similar model, becoming the premiere national laboratory in which the legal strategies of the civil rights movement were being formulated and tested. Murray explained: Many of the briefs in key cases before the Supreme Court were prepared in our law library, and exceptionally able students were rewarded for excellence by being permitted to research on a brief under the supervision of a professor. When a major case was to be presented to the Supreme Court, the entire school assembled to hear dress rehearsal arguments. Faculty members and alert students subjected the NAACP attorneys who argued these cases to searching questions, and by the time the attorneys appeared before the nine justices they were thoroughly prepared to defend their positions. 38 Despite the auspiciousness of Howard’s intellectual and political culture, Murray also bore the brunt of deeply ingrained sexist practices. The only female student in her class, she was excluded from joining the campus legal fraternity. When she confronted Ransom about this obviously exclusive process, he told her to start her own legal sorority. Murray perceived her exclusion from the “fraternity of lawyers who would make civil rights history” not as an isolated case of sexism, but rather a representative case of a larger practice of sexist exclusion among many of the most notable civil rights pioneers. “The discovery,” wrote Murray, “that Ransom and other men I deeply admired because of their dedication to civil rights, men who themselves suffered racial indignities, could countenance the exclusion of women from their professional association aroused an incipient feminism in me long before I knew the meaning of the term ‘feminism.’” 39 Her experience within the intellectual and political culture at Howard involved a kind of cultural disciplining and gender policing designed to force Murray into her “place.” Still beset with conflicts over her gender identity, Murray herself struggled to know what her place was. In May of 1943, the summer before her final year at Howard Law, she found herself again hospitalized with depression, this time in Freedman’s Hospital on Howard’s campus. Dealing with the kinds of racial masculinity propagated at Howard, and the deliberate exclusion from certain privileges on account of her femaleness, certainly did not help matters. When Murray confronted the politics of racial manhood in operation at Howard, she also confronted a kind of racial disciplining that encoded a demand for strict gender conformity. Racial respectability demanded not only heteronormative gender role performances and sexual relations, but also cisgender identity performances as well. Though she was clearly committed to the uplift of her race, Murray struggled to “become a woman.”

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  And that is a shame, for a revolutionary must be capable of, above all, total self-autonomy.” 57 Sounding a note of concern similar to that expressed by Murray twenty years earlier, Bambara complained about Black women being “jammed in the rigid confines of those basically oppressive social contrived roles,” arguing that these investments were rooted in the economic demands made on men to accumulate property in a capitalist system and with the imposed cultural dictates of Christianity. If precolonial African societies were an indicator, Bambara argued (despite her skepticism over white anthropological accounts of Africa), “no rigid and hysterical separation based on sexual taboos” existed. 58 Still, Black men frequently remained invested in the idea “that Black women must be supportive and patient so that Black men can regain their manhood. The notion of womanhood—they argue ... is dependent on his defining his manhood. So the shit goes on.” These men, she accused, were “obsessive,” about their “lost balls.” But revolution “entails at the very least cracking through the veneer of this sick society’s definition of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.’” 59 Not only would engagement with revolution transform the self, and implode gender role ideology, but it would necessarily transform family structures. Invoking Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism, Bambara argued that when willfully engaged in a revolutionary freedom struggle, “the ‘family’ was no longer a socially ordained nuclear unit to perpetuate the species or legitimize sexuality, but an extended kinship of cellmates and neighbors linked in the business of actualizing a vision of a liberated society.” 60 As Brooks demanded of intellectuals, Bambara turned the notion of family on its head and then offered up a completely reconfigured concept that she viewed as more relevant to the aims of Black revolutionary struggle. Black women, particularly Black clubwomen, had been the original theoreticians of the Black family as an institution. Like Cooper who argued that “a race is but a total of families,” Bambara connected family configuration to the articulation of racial identity or “Blackhood.” 61 But she rejected the respectable ideas of family that Cooper and early race women believed in. Bambara entered into that long intellectual legacy of theorizing race and family, cultivated by Black women, showing more concretely the linkages between one’s racial goals and the ways in which that directly related to the structure of the Black family. However, she rejected the liberal, assimilationist paradigms that Murray and others adopted by associating binary configurations of gender with hierarchical ideas propagated by white supremacy, capitalism, and Christianity. Bambara thus insisted on the need for a political and economic revolution.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  I CHAPTER 4 The Problems and Possibilities of the Negro Woman Intellectual Negro women intellectuals share two responsibilities: to really be an intellectual (although she may not eat well, have friends and be credited with loose screws) and to help shape a new definition of femininity. —Ponchitta Pierce, Ebony Magazine (1966) n 1966, the year that “Black Power” replaced “Freedom Now” as the dominant slogan of the Civil Rights movement, Black communities struggled to determine the best leadership strategies for racial advancement. One year earlier, the infamous Moynihan Report had branded Black women as the denizens of Black racial pathology because of their alleged iron-fisted matriarchal rule of Black families. Whereas Black women’s ideas about building strong Black families had been the driving force of their political organizing in women’s clubs in the first half of the twentieth century, the Moynihan report indicated that the uplift infrastructure Black women had so carefully built had crumbled. Along with it came a resurgence of the cultural distrust of Black women’s political ideas and leadership abilities. The performance of respectable racial manhood and womanhood had failed to foster Black people’s full assimilation into U.S. civil society. Indicative of this cultural upheaval, an Ebony Magazine special issue on “The Negro Woman” contained an article entitled “Problems of the Negro Woman Intellectual.” 1 It began with this observation: “The Negro woman intellectual is easily one of the most misunderstood, unappreciated and problem- ridden of all God’s creatures. In fact, if it were left to many Negro males alone to decide, she would not even exist.” 2 Cultural hyperbole aside, being a Black woman intellectual apparently constituted the stuff of existential crisis. Though Black communities may have been in crisis because of shifts in Black leadership and damaging national discourses, Ebony Magazine chose to place that crisis at the feet of Black women, even though the author acknowledged that it was Black men who were most uncomfortable. Black men were quick, wrote Ponchitta Pierce, to “deprecate the woman intellectual,” even though “few really know this object of their discontent.” 3 Black women intellectuals defied existing categories of cultural and racial identity, creating both a political and intellectual problem within Black communities that, since the nineteenth century, had responded to political instability by reasserting the primacy of traditional gender roles. The escalation of the intergenerational conflict between Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) in the summer of 1966 dramatized not only two kinds of Black political possibilities, but also two potential kinds of Black masculine gender performance—the respectable racial manhood of old and the revolutionary militant Black manhood of the present. The fact that the constitution of Black gender categories was at stake in these political battles was obscured by the more pressing problem of choosing a political path. By 1967, in response to this cultural and political upheaval, Harold Cruse proclaimed Black intellectuals to be in full-scale crisis, in his now-classic polemic Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  23 “Moreover, I swore to them in the wilderness that I would scatter them among the [Gentile] nations and disperse them among the countries, 24 because they had not observed My ordinances, but had [dishonored and] rejected My statutes and had profaned My Sabbaths, and set their eyes on the [man-made] idols of their fathers. 25 “[Therefore] I also gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live; [Ps 81:12 ; Is 66:4 ; Rom 1:21–25 , 28 ] 26 and I pronounced them unclean because of their offerings [to their idols], in that they made all their firstborn pass through the fire [as pagan sacrifices], so that I might make them desolate, in order that they might know [without any doubt] that I am the LORD .” ’ [Lev 20:2–5 ] 27 “Therefore, son of man, speak to the house of Israel and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD , “Again in this your fathers have blasphemed Me, in that they acted faithlessly and treacherously against Me. 28 “For when I had brought them into the land which I swore to give to them, they saw every high hill and every dark and leafy tree [as a place for idol worship], and there they offered their sacrifices and there they presented their offering that provoked My anger; there also they made their sweet-smelling aroma and there poured out their drink offerings. 29 “Then I said to them, ‘What is the high place to which you go?’ So the name of it is called Bamah (High Place) to this day.” ’ 30 “Therefore, say to the house of Israel, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD , “Will you [exiles] defile yourselves in the same manner as your fathers? And will you prostitute yourselves before their loathsome and heinous things? 31 “When you offer your gifts, when you make your sons pass through the fire, you are defiling yourselves with all your idols to this day. And shall I be asked by you [for an oracle], O house of Israel? As I live,” says the Lord GOD , “I will not be inquired of by you. 32 “What comes into your mind will never happen, when you say, ‘We will be like the [pagan] nations, like the tribes of the [Gentile] countries, serving [idols made of] wood and stone.’ God Will Restore Israel to Her Land 33 “As I live,” says the Lord GOD , “most certainly with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with wrath poured out, I shall be King over you. 34 “I will bring you out from the peoples and will gather you from the countries in which you are scattered, with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm, and with wrath poured out; 35 and I will bring you into the wilderness of the peoples, and there I will enter into judgment with you and contend with you face to face.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Murray’s masculine gender performance caused problems for her in both her activism and in her education. In 1938, she attempted to desegregate a University of North Carolina graduate program, ironically the same program in which Garfinkel would become a student. Denied admission because of her race, Murray sought to become one of the NAACP’s test cases under the Plessy segregation statute. Murray pursued admittance to UNC with her characteristic fervor. She wrote letters to the UNC president, the campus newspaper, and other local opponents like James Shepard, president of North Carolina College for Negroes.28 But her unapologetic boldness was perceived as a dangerous, if naive, brashness by the NAACP’s leadership, especially Roy Wilkins. Glenda Gilmore notes that Roy Wilkins actively lobbied against the NAACP taking Murray’s case because “since she has gone this far [in writing letters], she should be allowed to proceed by herself.”29 Officially, the NAACP declined Murray’s case on the grounds that her college attendance and subsequent employment in New York made her state residency claim shaky. However, I concur with Gilmore’s assessment that Wilkins’s decision was motivated by more personal matters, including Murray’s less-than-secret lesbian associations, and even perhaps her bouts with mental illness. Murray’s refusal to comply, at least during her college and young adult years, with the compulsory heterosexuality demanded of all respectable race figures, especially its women, became costly as she sought to champion racial causes. Her leadership style was precocious, aggressive, combative, unrelenting, and intellectual. With regard to her intellectual and rhetorical ability, Murray never suffered from a lack of confidence. She often registered her protest at various and sundry injustices through lengthy letters that she referred to as “confrontation by typewriter.”30 During her work with A. Philip Randolph on the first March on Washington Movement in the early 1940s, Murray told him that she considered herself one of his “lieutenants” in the struggle against racial repression.31 Wilkins himself was undoubtedly exasperated by what he and Marshall referred to as Murray’s “maverick spirit.”32 This sense of self-possession and her sense of wanting to be classed as a man among men caused Murray to be off-putting to figures like Wilkins and Marshall, who were not known for their progressive attitudes on gender.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Most of the people named would be men like Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates, Michael Eric Dyson, Marc Lamont Hill, and Robin D. G. Kelley. However, the list of women would still primarily include Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, bell hooks, and Patricia Williams. The one remarkable addition would be Melissa Harris-Perry. Harris-Perry, a full professor of political science at Wake Forest University, hosted a popular weekend cable news show offering overtly Black feminist cultural and political commentary on everything from politics to popular culture from 2012 to 2016. Her show absolutely transformed the landscape of possibility for Black women intellectuals by routinely highlighting the important intellectual contributions of a range of other Black women thinkers inside and outside the academy. In November 2015, Melissa Harris-Perry and Valerie Jarrett, the director of the White House Council on Women and Girls convened a historic summit at the White House called “Advancing Equity for Women and Girls of Color.” 5 This work is directly attributable to the organizing undertaken by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw and a group of academics, activists, and philanthropists, after President Obama pledged in 2014 to address the social injustices facing only men and boys of color through an initiative called My Brother’s Keeper. Black women were outraged at the President’s attempt to exclude Black women and girls, who experience racial injustice right alongside Black men and boys. In addition to an open letter organized by Crenshaw’s African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and a national traveling series of town halls featuring testimonies of women and girls of color organized by Crenshaw and Joanne Smith of Girls for Gender Equity, the AAPF issued a series of reports documenting the unique intersectional jeopardies faced by Black girls. 6 Harris-Perry took up this cause by featuring stories about this counter-organizing against My Brother’s Keeper on her show and then using the Anna Julia Cooper Research Center, which she founded at Wake Forest University, to partner with the White House in a ten-year research project about Black women and girls. These efforts to make visible and legible the plight of Black women and girls, this campaign to rescue them from political and social obscurity, fits within the long history, documented in this book, of Black women making the case that Black women’s lives are worthy of study and that their struggles are worthy of social remedy. The organizing of Crenshaw, Harris-Perry, Smith, and others also places these race women within a history of Black women using institutional access and resources to make the plight of Black women and girls visible. It is frustrating that Black women have to keep fighting such battles in every generation. But this book demonstrates that they have a very robust and multigenerational playbook to aid their efforts. Harris-Perry’s time as a host at MSNBC was nothing if not embattled.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Despite the auspiciousness of Howard’s intellectual and political culture, Murray also bore the brunt of deeply ingrained sexist practices. The only female student in her class, she was excluded from joining the campus legal fraternity. When she confronted Ransom about this obviously exclusive process, he told her to start her own legal sorority. Murray perceived her exclusion from the “fraternity of lawyers who would make civil rights history” not as an isolated case of sexism, but rather a representative case of a larger practice of sexist exclusion among many of the most notable civil rights pioneers. “The discovery,” wrote Murray, “that Ransom and other men I deeply admired because of their dedication to civil rights, men who themselves suffered racial indignities, could countenance the exclusion of women from their professional association aroused an incipient feminism in me long before I knew the meaning of the term ‘feminism.’”39 Her experience within the intellectual and political culture at Howard involved a kind of cultural disciplining and gender policing designed to force Murray into her “place.” Still beset with conflicts over her gender identity, Murray herself struggled to know what her place was. In May of 1943, the summer before her final year at Howard Law, she found herself again hospitalized with depression, this time in Freedman’s Hospital on Howard’s campus. Dealing with the kinds of racial masculinity propagated at Howard, and the deliberate exclusion from certain privileges on account of her femaleness, certainly did not help matters. When Murray confronted the politics of racial manhood in operation at Howard, she also confronted a kind of racial disciplining that encoded a demand for strict gender conformity. Racial respectability demanded not only heteronormative gender role performances and sexual relations, but also cisgender identity performances as well. Though she was clearly committed to the uplift of her race, Murray struggled to “become a woman.”

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  22 “The LORD could no longer endure it, because of the evil of your acts and the repulsive acts which you have committed; because of them your land has become a ruin, an object of horror and a curse, without inhabitant, as it is this day. 23 “Because you have burned sacrifices [to idols] and because you have sinned against the LORD and have not obeyed the voice of the LORD or walked in His law and in His statutes and in His testimonies, therefore this tragedy has fallen on you, as it has this day.” 24 Then Jeremiah said to all the people, including all the women, “Hear the word of the LORD , all [you of] Judah who are in the land of Egypt, 25 thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, as follows: ‘You and your wives have both declared with your mouth and fulfilled it with your hand, saying, “We will certainly perform our vows that we have vowed, to burn sacrifices to the queen of heaven (Ishtar) and to pour out drink offerings to her.” Surely then confirm your vows and go ahead and perform your vows! [If you intend to defy all My warnings, proceed!]’ 26 “Therefore hear the word of the LORD , all [you people of] Judah who are living in the land of Egypt, ‘Behold, I have sworn [an oath] by My great Name,’ says the LORD , ‘that My Name shall never again be invoked by the mouth of any man of Judah in all the land of Egypt, saying, “As the Lord GOD lives.” 27 ‘Behold, I am watching over them for harm and not for good; and all the men of Judah who are in the land of Egypt shall be consumed by the sword and by famine until they are all destroyed. 28 ‘Yet a small number [of My choosing] who escape the sword will return from the land of Egypt to the land of Judah; and all the remnant of Judah who have gone to the land of Egypt to reside there will know whose words will stand, Mine or theirs.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  5 “Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break [the sanctity of] the Sabbath and yet are innocent? [Num 28:9 , 10 ] 6 “But I tell you that something greater than the temple is here. 7 “And if you had only known what this statement means, ‘I DESIRE COMPASSION [for those in distress], d AND NOT [animal] SACRIFICE ,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. [Hos 6:6 ; Matt 9:13 ] Lord of the Sabbath 8 “For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” 9 Leaving there, He went into their synagogue. [Mark 3:1–6 ; Luke 6:6–11 ] 10 A man was there whose hand was withered. And they asked Jesus, “Is it lawful and permissible to heal on the Sabbath?”—they asked this so that they might accuse Him and bring charges into court. 11 But He said to them, “What man is there among you who, if he has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out? 12 “How much more valuable then is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful and permissible to do good on the Sabbath.” 13 Then He said to the man, “Reach out your hand!” The man reached out and it was restored, as normal and healthy as the other. 14 But the Pharisees went out and conspired against Him, discussing how they could destroy Him. 15 Being aware of this, Jesus left there. Many followed Him, and He healed all of them [who were sick], 16 and warned them not to tell [publicly] who He was. 17 This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: 18 “BEHOLD , MY SERVANT WHOM I HAVE CHOSEN ; MY BELOVED IN WHOM MY SOUL IS WELL-PLEASED ; I WILL PUT MY SPIRIT UPON HIM , AND HE WILL PROCLAIM JUSTICE TO THE NATIONS . 19 “HE WILL NOT QUARREL , NOR CRY OUT LOUDLY ; NOR WILL ANYONE HEAR HIS VOICE IN THE STREETS . 20 “A BATTERED REED HE WILL NOT BREAK , AND A SMOLDERING WICK HE WILL NOT EXTINGUISH , UNTIL HE LEADS JUSTICE TO VICTORY . 21 “AND IN HIS NAME THE GENTILES (all the nations of the world) WILL HOPE [with confidence].” [Is 42:1–4 ] The Pharisees Rebuked 22 Then a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute was brought to Jesus, and He healed him, so that the mute man both spoke and saw.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 44–45.33. Ibid., 45.34. See Gaines, Uplifting the Race, introduction and chapters 1 and 5.35. E. Frances White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 14 and 36–37.36. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 912–20.37. Morris, Close Kin and Distant Relatives, 3.38. Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Knopf, 2010), 76–78 and 160.39. Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives,” 918.40. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 394–95.41. Ibid.42. For example, see Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s essay, “Where Are the Black Female Intellectuals?” on the framing of Black intellectual work in Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual Reconsidered, ed. Jerry Watts (New York: Routledge, 2004), 223–26.43. See Williams, In Search of the Talented Tenth. Chapter 3 includes the most substantive discussion of women at Howard.44. Martin Kilson, Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 5.45. See all these descriptions of literary workers in Hopkins, “Some Literary Workers,” in Dworkin, Daughter of the Revolution, 140–55.46. Cooper, Voice from the South, 140–42.47. Black women’s listing practices persist well into the twenty-first century. In 2002, when Halle Berry won the Academy Award for Best Actress, becoming the first and only Black woman to date to have won the award, she began her speech, saying, “This moment is bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, and Diahann Carroll. It’s for the women that stand beside me. Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox and it’s for every nameless, faceless, woman of color that now has the chance because this door tonight has been opened.” At Oprah Winfrey’s Legend’s Ball in 2005, novelist Pearl Cleage presented a poem called, “We Speak Your Names,” to honor the scores of Black women pioneers in artistic and creative fields. In one stanza, Cleage wrote, “We are here to speak your names / because we have sense enough to know / that we did not spring full blown from the / forehead of Zeus / or arrive on the scene like Topsy, our sister once / removed, who somehow just growed / We know that we are walking in footprints made / deep by confident strides / of women who parted the air before them like / forces of nature you are.” Pearl Cleage and Zaron Burnet Jr., We Speak Your Names: A Celebration (New York: One World, 2005).48. Gore, Theoharis, and Woodard, Want to Start a Revolution? 8.49. Carla Peterson’s Doers of the Word also played a critical role in considering the intellectual contributions from 1830 to 1880, but she focused solely on Black women living up North. See Peterson, Doers of the Word.50. Kristin Waters and Carol B.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  11 “But you who abandon (turn away from) the LORD , Who forget and ignore My holy mountain (Zion), Who set a table for Gad [the Babylonian god of fortune], And who fill a jug of mixed wine for Meni [the god of fate], 12 I will destine you for the sword, [says the LORD ], And all of you will bow down to the slaughter, Because when I called, you did not answer; When I spoke, you did not listen or obey. But you did [what was] evil in My sight And chose that in which I did not delight.” 13 Therefore, the Lord GOD says this, “Listen carefully, My servants will eat, but you will be hungry; Indeed, My servants will drink, but you will be thirsty; Indeed, My servants will rejoice, but you will be put to shame. 14 “Indeed, My servants will shout for joy from a happy heart, But you will cry out with a heavy heart, And you shall wail and howl from a broken spirit. 15 “And you will leave your name behind to My chosen ones [who will use it] as a curse, And the Lord GOD will put you to death, But He will call His servants by another name [a much greater name, just as the name Israel was greater than the name Jacob]. [Gen 32:28 ; Jer 29:22 ] 16 “Because he who blesses himself on the earth Will bless himself by the God of truth and faithfulness; And he who swears [an oath] on the earth Will swear by the God of truth and faithfulness; Because the former troubles are forgotten, And because they are hidden from My sight. [2 Cor 1:20 ; Rev 3:14 ] New Heavens and a New Earth 17 “Behold, I am creating new heavens and a new earth; And the former things [of life] will not be remembered or come to mind. [Is 66:22 ; 2 Pet 3:13 ; Rev 21:1 ] 18 “But be glad and rejoice forever over what I create; Behold, I am creating Jerusalem to be a source of rejoicing And her people a joy. 19 “I will also rejoice in Jerusalem and be glad in My people; And there will no longer be heard in her The voice of weeping and the sound of crying. 20 “No longer shall there be e in it an infant who lives only a few days, Or an old man who does not finish his days; For the youth who dies at the age of a hundred, And the one who does not reach the age of a hundred Will be thought of as accursed. 21 “They will build houses and live in them; They will plant vineyards and eat the fruit. 22 “They will not build and another occupy; They will not plant and another eat [the fruit].

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Black men. Black Woman disrupts this all-male intellectual fraternity of texts both by signaling a set of past practices and by marshaling in an intellectual future for Black women. Proclaiming from the first line of the preface, “[W]e are involved in a struggle for liberation,” Bambara goes on to clarify that the “first job is to find out what liberation for ourselves means, what work it entails, what benefits it will yield.” “To do that,” Black women often initially turned “to various fields of studies to extract materials, data necessary to define that term in respect to ourselves.” However, their searches yielded little information. Much like Fannie Barrier Williams had recognized in 1893, Bambara and her contributors “note[d], however, all too quickly the lack of relevant material.” 45 Psychiatry as a field continued to prescribe conservative definitions of womanhood and gender and to reduce the quest for liberation to the freedom of women “to enjoy orgasm.” Moreover, much of the research on Black people tended to “clump the men and women together and focus so heavily on what white people have done to the psyches of Blacks, that what Blacks have done to and for themselves is overlooked, and what distinguishes the men from the women forgotten.” 46 In short, one major problem was that “‘the experts’ are still men, Black or white. And the images of the woman are still derived from their needs, their fantasies, their secondhand knowledge, their agreement with other ‘experts.’” And it remained unclear to what extent the work of the few white women experts would be applicable to Black women: “[H]ow relevant are the truths, the experiences, the findings of white women to Black women? Are women after all simply women? I don’t know that our priorities are the same, that our concerns and methods are the same, or even similar enough so that we can afford to depend on this new field of experts (white, female).” 47 Contesting the idea of the “expert” was critical to making space for Black women as intellectuals and combating decades of epistemic subjugation. Bambara worked from the premise that Black women’s experiences, and their ability to articulate them, trumped questionable forms of external “expertise.” She concluded, like the women of the NACW had done over three-quarters of a century earlier, that Black women must study themselves. And they had been “forming work-study groups, discussion clubs, cooperative nurseries, cooperative businesses, ... women’s caucuses within existing organizations, [and] Afro-American women’s magazines” with the goal of studying and making legible various kinds of Black female selfhoods. By celebrating the profusion of community spaces in which Black women were conducting self study, Bambara resisted a top-down account of racial knowledge production, demonstrating a range of horizontal spaces in which Black women were coming together to make sense of their own lives.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  project. That fact alone makes it untenable for scholars to continue to read Black women’s literature solely or primarily through the corporeal frames offered to us by the culture of dissemblance or the politics of respectability. Respectability and dissemblance belong to a broader constellation of social formulations that race women theorized and enacted to protect themselves and make themselves known on their own terms. But if we fail to move beyond respectability, we will continue to miss critical parts of the story. Cooper, like other Black women thinkers of her time, recognized that muting her body, or dissembling, offered little safety and limited prospects for achieving respectability. For instance, in what is most assuredly an allusion to Ida B. Wells’s violent encounter on a train in the late 1880s, Cooper wrote, “I purposely forbear to mention instances of personal violence to colored women traveling in less civilized sections of our country, where women have been forcibly ejected from cars, thrown out of seats, their garments rudely torn, their person wantonly and cruelly injured.” 19 This forthright presentation of a Black female body injured in the process of doing race work is just one of many examples of how embodied discourse shows up in Cooper’s work and that of other Black women—pushing us to deal with the embodied dimensions of public Black women’s lives. Cooper’s use of embodied discourse as a disruptive textual practice ultimately locates Black female bodies within the project of racial knowledge production and the reorganization of place or public space. For Cooper, and for this project, Black bodies—and in particular, Black women’s bodies—mark possibilities and generative tensions that are sites of inspiration and theory production. Whether the orienting Black body included a pregnant woman, a young man, an embryonic, gender neutral body, or even her own body experiencing various modes of segregation, Cooper’s work can be read through tracking the varying invocations of Black bodies as a mechanism for theory production itself. In the rest of this book, I follow Cooper’s lead by looking for the variety of ways that the other Black women thinkers under examination—women like Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Pauli Murray—invoke notions of embodiment as part of their theoretical production. By looking for the appearance of Black women’s bodies, we can track the variety of ways that race women asserted their own ideas about what it means to be Black women intellectuals despite, and often in light of, the precarities of Black female embodiment. Doing so has important theoretical and methodological implications. Focusing on the ways that Black women discuss embodied experience in their social theorizing reminds us that Black women did not only seek to make Black female bodies respectable.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  that it was our duty to let the world know, for instance, how we felt about having our rights as citizens violently snatched away, how alarmed we were at the result of wholesale disfranchisement of colored men in a whole section, how we were misrepresented when lynching was discussed, how cruel and terrible is the Convict Lease System, that new form of slavery in some respects more cruel and more crushing than the old & If a Colored Person insisted that it was our duty as a race to call attention to all this, I say, he was told that he was just stirring up trouble, that he had better be quiet, agitation never did any good.19 Not much had changed in the way of Black elite apathy by 1913. Not only had these people not become meddlers, but they also had become the group, who in Terrell’s estimation, most stridently discouraged agitation: “Intelligent men and women who hold doplomas [sic] from college, whose brains had been trained to think were as loud and bitter in their denunciation of agitators as was the humble toiler who did not know his a-b-cs. And yet these people had read history.”20 That reading of history, she argued, should have exposed them to men such as abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. In her 1905 essay, she had invoked Garrison as an exemplary meddler whose willingness to interfere with the Peculiar Institution had been instrumental in ending slavery. By 1913, she argued that Garrison’s history in the abolition movement demonstrated that “if it had not been agitation, continuous, earnest almost fierce agitation against the iniquitous institution of slavery, we might have all been slaves today.”21 Meddling, then, had merely been a euphemism for agitation, and by 1913, she clearly determined to throw off the use of euphemisms and drive right to the point. Surely “college educated men and women knew that no race which allowed its rights violently to be snatched away without a loud and earnest protest against it, could maintain its own self-respect.” Yet, much to her chagrin, racial elites continued to suggest that “agitation would do us no good.”22

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Murray fundamentally rejected the idea that a “scientific” diagnosis was intrinsically accurate and, though she could not precisely articulate why, seemed to intuitively understand some form of disconnect between how her sexuality was being described (i.e., diagnosed) and what it actually was. As Michel Foucault has so carefully documented, homosexuality was a discursive invention, “a category … constituted to codify normal and abnormal sexualities from the moment it was characterized” in 1870.13 Murray tried at different turns to resist each of these discourses: first, rejecting science in favor of a belief in herself; next embracing science rather than psychiatry, which would have labeled her as deviant; and finally, turning to religious explanations coupled with experimental science. Though Murray evinced a tension at the labels that religion, science, and psychoanalysis all sought to impose upon her, she was also mired in the discursive in a way that absolutely exasperated her. The questionnaires in her archive, coupled with the copious amounts of research she did about available scientific treatments, demonstrate both legibly and tangibly that race women’s use of embodied discourse as a textual strategy was deeply informed by struggle and contestation. Although prior race women used embodied discourse to contest assertions of Black inferiority, the justifications for lynching, and the attempt to malign Black women’s morals, Murray literally struggled to make her masculine gender identity and her female sexual physiology adhere to accepted scientific categories. As Foucault has made clear, scientific categories of sexuality are discursive constructions that shape how we live and experience these identities. Whereas nineteenth-century race women used their autobiographies, speeches, and other writings to challenge derogatory social discourses about Black womanhood, Murray—in her private correspondence to doctors, campaign for hormone therapy, and later attempts to be admitted to the all-male Harvard Law School, along with her two autobiographies—used embodied discourse and, more specifically, the schisms around how she experienced her own embodiment, as a textual and social praxis that allowed her both to demonstrate her fitness for received social categories and also alternately to challenge those same gender and sexual categories. Though transgender people existed, the contemporary category of transgender or trans simply did not exist in any medically ascertainable form by 1940.14 By challenging existing categories of sexual orientation, gender identity, and biological sex, Murray’s struggle presaged the very debates that would take place one decade later between John Money and other sexologists who began to grapple with the meaning of homosexuality, the relationship of gender to sex, the meanings of intersexuality and hermaphroditism, and a whole host of other terms. Unfortunately, Murray’s own ascent to race leadership outpaced advances in the scientific scholarship on biological sex and transgender identity, limiting her options and forcing her to make difficult decisions about her identity.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  All together, the federal government has spent $1.7 billion plus on abstinence-only programs since 1982; that money might just as well have been set on fire. As I mentioned earlier, while virginity pledgers delayed intercourse for a few months longer than their nonpledging peers, when they did become sexually active, they were less likely to protect themselves or their partners against pregnancy or disease. The same holds true for participants in abstinence-only classes. Studies stretching back over a decade have found that, at best, when compared to a control group, participants neither abstain entirely from sex nor delay intercourse; they also do not have fewer sexual partners. They are, however, a lot more likely to become unintentionally pregnant: as much as 60 percent more likely. That could lead one to suspect that abstinence-only advocates are more concerned with ideology than with public health or even sexual restraint—otherwise they would have given it up long ago for something that has been repeatedly proven to reduce teens’ sexual activity, increase their use of contraception and disease protection, and improve their relationships: comprehensive sex education. Under President Barack Obama, comprehensive sex ed finally got its first federal love, although the focus remained squarely on reducing negative consequences: $185 million earmarked for research and programs that have been shown, through rigorous evaluation, to reduce teen pregnancy. That money, of course, could easily disappear under another, less progressive commander in chief, and probably will: for instance, a clause buried in the Student Success Act, a Republican rewrite of No Child Left Behind that passed the House in the summer of 2015, zeros out any funding for programs that “normalize teen sexual activity as an expected behavior, implicitly or explicitly, whether homosexual or heterosexual.” Meanwhile, $75 million in abstinence-only funds continued to be doled out each year through the Affordable Care Act. While substantially less than under President Bush, that’s still an awful lot to blow on the sex ed equivalent of a tinfoil hat.