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)

  Chapter four returns to the question of what it means to be a Black woman intellectual by interrogating the claims in an article in Ebony Magazine in 1966 called “Problems of the Negro Woman Intellectual.” Given the ferment of racial crises in the 1960s, this chapter argues that much like the transitional period of the 1890s, the transition from Civil Rights to Black Power was marked by a tension over the roles that Black women would play, not only as political activists, but as intellectual leaders. Thus Harold Cruse’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual erased a long and significant history of Black women’s intellectual labor in order to sustain his narrative of racial crisis. What really seems to be in crisis are the terms of Black masculinity. I read Toni Cade Bambara’s book of essays Black Woman as a critical corrective to Cruse’s assertions because Black Woman presses the case for Black women’s centrality as thought leaders and public intellectuals in racial justice struggles, and Bambara and her comrades approach the same political moment as an opportunity for creativity around the articulation of new modes of what she terms Blackhood rather than embracing the narrative of crisis. In many ways, her anthology and the feminist anthologies that come after it expand on Black women’s intellectual practice of listing from the nineteenth century. In every period where Black communities struggled to find their thought leaders, Black women always named the women doing the work, but usually receive little credit for it. By the late twentieth century, these lists became full anthologies of Black women’s thinking about race, gender, and politics. This chapter makes clear that the struggle to be known and to have the range of Black women’s experiences properly articulated in the public sphere is a recurring struggle for Black women thinkers. At the same time, these women engage in a range of creative practices to make Black women’s lives legible in public discourse.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  3 “Speak a parable against the rebellious house [of Judah] and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD , “Put on a pot; put it on and also pour water into it; 4 “Put in it the pieces [of meat], Every good piece (the people of Jerusalem), the thigh and the shoulder; Fill it with choice bones. 5 “Take the choicest of the flock, And also pile wood under the pot. Make it boil vigorously And boil its bones in the pot.” 6 ‘Therefore, thus says the Lord GOD , “Woe (judgment is coming) to the bloody city, To the pot in which there is rust And whose rust has not gone out of it! Take out of it piece by piece, Without making any choice. 7 “For her blood [that she has shed] remains in her midst; She put it on the bare rock; She did not pour it on the ground To cover it with dust. 8 “That it may cause wrath to come up to take vengeance, I have put her blood [guilt for her children sacrificed to Molech] on the bare rock, That it may not be covered.” 9 ‘Therefore, thus says the Lord GOD , “Woe to the bloody city! I will also make the pile [of wood] high. 10 “Heap on wood, kindle the fire, Boil the meat well [done] And mix in the spices, And let the bones be burned. 11 “Then set the empty pot (Jerusalem) back on the coals So that it may be hot And its bronze may glow And its filthiness may be melted And its rust (scum) may be consumed. 12 “She has wearied Me with toil, Yet her great rust has not left her; Her thick rust and filth will not be burned away by fire [no matter how hot the flame]. 13 “In your filthiness are lewdness and outrage. Therefore I would have cleansed you, Yet you were not [willing to be] cleansed, You will not be cleansed from your filthiness again Until I have satisfied My wrath against you. 14 “I the LORD have spoken; it is coming and I will act. I will not relent, and I will not have compassion and I will not be sorry; in accordance with your ways and in accordance with your deeds I will judge and punish you,” says the Lord GOD .’ ” Death of Ezekiel’s Wife Is a Sign 15 Also the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 16 “Son of man, listen carefully, I am about to take away from you the desire of your eyes [your wife] with a single stroke. Yet you shall not mourn and you shall not weep, and your tears shall not flow. 17 “Sigh and groan in silence; do not mourn for the dead.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  9 Then Jesus said to them, “I ask you directly: Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath or to do evil, to save a life or to destroy it?” 10 After looking around at them all, He said to the man, “Stretch out your hand!” And he did, and his hand was [fully] restored. 11 But the scribes and Pharisees were filled with senseless rage [and lacked spiritual insight], and discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus. Choosing the Twelve 12 Now at this time Jesus went off to the mountain to pray, and He spent the whole night in prayer to God. 13 When day came, He called His disciples and selected twelve of them, whom He also named c apostles (special messengers, personally chosen representatives): [Matt 10:2–4 ; Mark 3:16–19 ] 14 Simon, whom He also named Peter, and his brother Andrew; and [the brothers] d James and John; and Philip, and Bartholomew [also called Nathanael]; 15 and Matthew (Levi, the tax collector) and Thomas; and e James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon who was called the Zealot; 16 Judas [also called Thaddaeus] the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor [to the Lord]. 17 Then Jesus came down with them and stood on a level place; and there was a large crowd of His disciples, and a vast multitude of people from all over Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon, 18 who had come to listen to Him and to be healed of their diseases. Even those who were troubled by unclean spirits (demons) were being healed. 19 All the people were trying to touch Him, because [healing] power was coming from Him and healing them all. The Beatitudes 20 And looking toward His disciples, He began f speaking: “Blessed [spiritually prosperous, happy, to be admired] are you who are poor [in spirit, those devoid of spiritual arrogance, those who regard themselves as insignificant], for the kingdom of God is yours [both now and forever]. [Matt 5:3–12 ] 21 “Blessed [joyful, nourished by God’s goodness] are you who hunger now [for righteousness, actively seeking right standing with God], for you will be [completely] satisfied. Blessed [forgiven, refreshed by God’s grace] are you who weep now [over your sins and repent], for you will laugh [when the burden of sin is lifted]. 22 “Blessed [morally courageous and spiritually alive with life-joy in God’s goodness] are you when people hate you, and exclude you [from their fellowship], and insult you, and scorn your name as evil because of [your association with] the Son of Man. 23 “Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for your reward in heaven is great [absolutely inexhaustible]; for their fathers used to treat the prophets in the same way.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  10 So the Jews kept saying to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath, and you are not d permitted to pick up your pallet [because it is unlawful].” 11 He answered them, “The Man who healed me and gave me back my strength was the One who said to me, ‘Pick up your pallet and walk.’ ” 12 They asked him, “Who is the Man who told you, ‘Pick up your pallet and walk’?” 13 Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had slipped away [unnoticed] since there was a crowd in that place. 14 Afterward, Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you are well! Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” 15 The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. 16 For this reason the Jews began to persecute Jesus continually because He was doing these things on the Sabbath. 17 But Jesus answered them, “My Father has been working until now [He has never ceased working], and I too am working.” Jesus’ Equality with God 18 This made the Jews more determined than ever to kill Him, for not only was He breaking the Sabbath [from their viewpoint], but He was also calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God. 19 So Jesus answered them by saying, “I assure you and most solemnly say to you, the Son e can do nothing of Himself [of His own accord], unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever things the Father does, the Son [in His turn] also does in the same way. 20 “For the Father dearly loves the Son and shows Him everything that He Himself is doing; and the Father will show Him greater works than these, so that you will be filled with wonder. 21 “Just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life [and allows them to live on], even so the Son also gives life to whom He wishes. 22 “For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment [that is, the prerogative of judging] to the Son [placing it entirely into His hands], 23 so that all will give honor (reverence, homage) to the Son just as they give honor to the Father. [In fact] the one who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who has sent Him. 24 “I assure you and most solemnly say to you, the person who hears My word [the one who heeds My message], and believes and trusts in Him who sent Me, has (possesses now) eternal life [that is, eternal life actually begins—the believer is transformed], and does not come into judgment and condemnation, but has passed [over] from death into life.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  [Acts 2:17–21 ; Rom 10:13 ] Joel 3 The Nations Will Be Judged 1 “F OR BEHOLD, in those [climactic] days and at that time, When I restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem, 2 I will gather together all the [Gentile] nations [that were hostile to My people] And bring them down into the Valley of Jehoshaphat (the LORD has judged). And there I will deal with them and enter into judgment with them there For [their treatment of] My people, My inheritance, Israel, Whom they have scattered among the nations, And [because] they have encroached on My land and divided it up. 3 “They have also cast lots for My people, And have traded a boy for a prostitute And have sold a girl for wine that they may drink. 4 “Moreover, what are you to Me, O Tyre and Sidon and all the [five small] regions of Philistia? Will you pay Me back for something [I have supposedly done to you]? Even if you do pay Me back, I will swiftly and speedily return your deed [of retaliation] on your own head. [Is 23 ; Ezek 26:1–18 ; Amos 1:6–10 ; Zeph 2:4–7 ; Zech 9:2–7 ] 5 “Because you have taken My silver and My gold and have carried My precious treasures to your temples and palaces, 6 and have sold the children of Judah and the children of Jerusalem to the Greeks, so that you may send them far away from their territory, 7 behold, I am going to stir them up from the place where you have sold them [and return them to their land], and I shall return your action [of retaliation] on your own head. 8 “Also I will sell your sons and your daughters into the hand of the children of Judah, and they will sell them to the a Sabeans, to a distant nation,” for the LORD has spoken. [Is 14:2 ; 60:14 ] 9 Proclaim this among the [pagan] nations: Prepare a war! Stir up the mighty men! Let all the men of war come near, let them come up! 10 Beat your plowshares into swords And your pruning hooks into spears; Let the weak say, “I am strong!” [Is 2:4 ; Mic 4:3 ] 11 Hurry and come, all you surrounding nations, And gather yourselves there; Bring down, O LORD , Your mighty ones (Your warriors). 12 Let the nations be stirred [to action] And come up to the Valley of Jehoshaphat, For there I will sit to judge and punish All the surrounding nations. 13 Put in the sickle [of judgment], for the harvest is ripe; Come, tread [the grapes], for the wine press is full; The vats overflow, for the wickedness [of the people] is great. [Mark 4:29 ; Rev 14:15 , 18–20 ] 14 Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision (judgment)! For the day of the LORD is near in the valley of decision [when judgment is executed].

• 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 The Decameron (1353)

  Ghino di Tacco, a man very famous for his cruelty and his robberies, being expelled [Transcriber's Note: missing 'from'] Siena and at feud with the Counts of Santa Fiore, raised Radicofani against the Church of Rome and taking up his sojourn there, caused his swashbucklers despoil whosoever passed through the surrounding country. Now, Boniface the Eighth being pope in Rome, there came to court the Abbot of Cluny, who is believed to be one of the richest prelates in the world, and having there marred his stomach, he was advised by the physicians to repair to the baths of Siena and he would without fail be cured. Accordingly, having gotten the pope's leave, he set out on his way thither in great pomp of gear and baggage and horses and servitors, unrecking of Ghino's [ill] report. The latter, hearing of his coming, spread his nets and hemmed him and all his household and gear about in a strait place, without letting a single footboy escape. This done, he despatched to the abbot one, the most sufficient, of his men, well accompanied, who in his name very lovingly prayed him be pleased to light down and sojourn with the aforesaid Ghino in his castle. The abbot, hearing this, answered furiously that he would nowise do it, having nought to do with Ghino, but that he would fare on and would fain see who should forbid his passage. Whereto quoth the messenger on humble wise, 'Sir, you are come into parts where, barring God His might, there is nothing to fear for us and where excommunications and interdicts are all excommunicated; wherefore, may it please you, you were best comply with Ghino in this.'

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

  I Epilogue Straight men, unintentionally or intentionally, have taken the work of queer Black women and erased our contributions. Perhaps if we were the charismatic Black men many are rallying around these days, it would have been a different story, but being Black queer women in this society (and apparently within these movements) tends to equal invisibility and nonrelevancy. We completely expect those who benefit directly and improperly from White supremacy to try and erase our existence. We fight that every day. But when it happens amongst our allies, we are baffled, we are saddened, and we are enraged. —Alicia Garza (2014) n July 2013, organizers Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi used social media to proclaim that #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) after George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of seventeen-year-old unarmed Florida teen Trayvon Martin. By the next summer, August 2014, these young Black women found themselves at the helm of a new national civil rights movement as Black people in Ferguson, Missouri, and around the country took to the streets to protest the slaughter of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. Wilson claimed that the unarmed youth attacked him in his police car after Brown and his friend allegedly refused the officer’s command to “get the fuck up on the sidewalk” instead of walking in the middle of a residential street in his neighborhood. By October 2014, Alicia Garza wrote a herstory of the burgeoning BLM Movement, after early attempts at co-optation threatened to erase the intellectual and political labor undertaken by these three Black women. Much like Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Pauli Murray, and other race women who had come before her, she called out and stridently critiqued the continued celebration of heterosexual, charismatic Black male leadership. 1 Moreover, her comments appeared at Feminist Wire, an online site founded by two Black feminist academics, Tamura Lomax and Hortense Spillers, in order to highlight conversations of relevance to women of color about social justice. In the streets, in the academy, and online, Black women thinkers continue to reimagine and reshape the terms upon which Black women’s knowledge production takes place. It is, therefore, befitting that the intellectual geography and genealogy that I have been building in this book end at the beginning of this new, dynamic, and powerful women-led Movement for Black Lives. The largely Black female leadership of the Movement for Black Lives has the potential to usher in a new era in our thinking about the most effective models of racial leadership.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Once again let me say that it is not the courts of Oslo or the laws and codes of Norway which I inveigh against; everywhere in the civilized world there is this mummery and flummery manifesting as the Voice of Inertia. The offender who stands before the Court is not being tried by his peers but by his dead ancestors. The moral codes, operative only if they are in conformance with natural or divine laws, are not safeguarded by these flimsy dikes; on the contrary, they are exposed as weak and ineffectual barriers. Finally, here is the crux of the matter. Will an adverse decision by this court or any other court effectively hinder the further circulation of this book? The history of similar cases does not substantiate such an eventuality. If anything, an unfavorable verdict will only add more fuel to the flames. Proscription only leads to resistance; the fight goes on underground, becomes more insidious therefore, more difficult to cope with. If only one man in Norway reads the book and believes with the author that one has the right to express himself freely, the battle is won. You cannot eliminate an idea by suppressing it, and the idea which is linked with this issue is one of freedom to read what one chooses. Freedom, in other words, to read what is bad for one as well as what is good for one—or, what is simply innocuous. How can one guard against evil, in short, if one does not know what evil is? But it is not something evil, not something poisonous, which this book Sexus offers the Norwegian reader. It is a dose of life which I administered to myself first, and which I not only survived but thrived on. Certainly I would not recommend it to infants, but then neither would I offer a child a bottle of aqua vite . I can say one thing for it unblushingly—compared to the atom bomb, it is full of lifegiving qualities. Henry Miller 1 See his A Challenge to Sex Censors and other works. 2 From the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , Philadelphia, November, 1938. 3 More Essays of Love and Virtue . 4 Plexus (version française), Corrêa, Paris, 1952; Plexus (English version), Olympia Press, Paris, 1953. 5 Le Monde du Sexe , Corrêa, Paris, 1952. (Publisher’s Note.) 6 In Remember to Remember , New Directions, and The Intimate Henry Miller , New American Library. (Publisher’s Note.) 7 In Sunday After the War , New Directions, 1944, 1962; and The Intimate Henry Miller , New American Library, 1959.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  But, whether there is little art or bad art, art, it should be understood, is only a makeshift, a substitute for the real thing. There is only one art which, if we practiced it, would destroy what is called “art.” With every line I write I kill off the “artist” in me. With every line it is either murder in the first degree or suicide. I do not want to give hope to others, nor to inspire others. If we knew what it meant to be inspired we would not inspire. We would simply be . As it is we neither inspire nor aid one another: we deal out cold justice. For myself I want none of this stinking cold justice; I want either warm-hearted magnanimity or absolute neglect. To be honest, I want something more than any man can give me. I want everything! I want everything—or nothing. It’s crazy, I know, but that’s what I mean. Is it good here in France? It’s wonderful. Marvelous. For me it’s marvelous, because it’s the only place in the world I know of where I can go on with my murder-and-suicide business—until I strike a new zodiacal realm. For a French writer it may be bad here, but then I am not a French writer. I should hate to be a French or a German or a Russian or an American writer. It must be hell. I am a cosmological writer, and when I open my trap I broadcast to the whole world at once. (Like Father Divine: Peace! It’s Wonderful! ) Acting as I do I am apt to get it in the neck. I am apt to get fucked good and proper, and I know it. But that’s my temperament, and I’ll stand or fall by it. Eventually I shan’t even bother to be a cosmological writer: I shall be just a man . But first there’s a lot of slaughtering to be done. Every man who aspires to be a good French writer (or a bad one), or a (good or bad) German writer, or a (good or bad) Russian writer, any man, I mean, who hopes to make a living by giving regular doses of medicine to his sick countrymen, helps to perpetuate a farce which has been going on since the beginning of history. Such writers, and they are practically all we have, it seems, are the lice which keep us from knowing Paradise or Hell. They keep us in a perpetual Purgatory where we scratch without let. Whereas even the earth wobbles on its axis, or will change its axis from time to time, these blokes keep us forever on an even keel. In every great figure who has flashed across the horizon there is, or was, a large element of treachery, or hatred, or love, or disgust.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  They are simply the victims who subsequently, according to the hazards of fate, will be dubbed cowards or heroes. Their role is to obey. And, even though their lives should be spared, even though they be not mutilated in the flesh, they who survive will most certainly be maimed in spirit. Faced with a new war—for one war breeds another and another—it is unthinkable to expect of these ‘‘victims” that they be charitable and magnanimous. Having suffered unwillingly, it is inevitable that they will exact the same toll of their sons and daughters. … I say, then, that if this bondage of sacrifice and vengeance is not immoral, if it is not the last word in immorality, then the word has no meaning. We are not being destroyed or undermined by pornographic or obscene writings; we are being destroyed and damned in every way by making war or planning to make war. And now to come to the point of this seemingly gratuitous tirade. Thinking as I do, feeling as I do, about war, I would nevertheless refuse to destroy books dealing with the manufacture of war materials or war machines, or with the manufacture of poison gases or the creation of destructive bacteria, or any other of the fiendish inventions of the military-minded; I would not destroy books dealing with military strategy or with the rules and conventions governing “civilized” warfare. On the contrary, I would wish to see the distribution and circulation of all such literature increased. I would have children informed as to these matters as well as grown-ups. I would have every man, woman and child throughout the land become as familiar with these words as they are supposed to be with the Holy Bible. I would go yet further. I would put the Bible on one shelf and all this homicidal literature on another shelf. I would say: If you look at the one, then you must look at the other also. I would make a clean cleavage between the book in which it is commanded not to kill and all the other books in which human slaughter, slaughter en masse, is taught, explained, approved and exemplified. I would divide family against family, brother against brother, on this single question. Act according to your conscience, I would urge. Either it is going to be one world or no world before long. If you are for the world of death, enlist in it immediately! Do not confound us with your indecision. Do not speak of morality if your ultimate aim is to collaborate in the destruction of our world. Between the Bible and the slaughter-house manuals lies the world of literature, evolved through human passion, hunger and imagination, and dealing with human thought, deed, dream and aspiration. It is a world drawn from life, concerned only with life, and sustaining life. If there is death in it it is but to the extent that it lacks fire, depth, freedom and choice.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Nothing changed between them afterward. Instead, they fell into a pattern: when they saw each other at parties, they would make out, he might “finger” her (though not to orgasm), and she would give him a blow job. They never went out on a date. They never met each other’s parents. She’d never even been to his house until they decided to have intercourse. Maddie was sixteen by then and wanted her first time to be with Kyle. They even bought condoms together beforehand, “like a real boyfriend and girlfriend.” She remembers the event itself as sweet, but uncomfortable and a little boring: “It hurt really badly for about two minutes, and then I mostly looked at my nails,” she told me. She was proud, though, to have had sex sober, during the day, in a bedroom, with someone she loved. Until, that is, a few weeks later, when she heard that Kyle was also having sex with someone else. Maddie was livid. Her plot for revenge seemed ripped from a script of Gossip Girl: that weekend, she would go “looking all hot” to a party where she knew he’d be. And then? She would hook up with one of his friends. “I’m going to win!” she remembered thinking. Somehow, though, in a series of convoluted mishaps that don’t make sense to anyone over seventeen, she ended up at the wrong place—a houseful of seniors from a neighboring town, mostly boys, none of whom she knew well, all of whom had been drinking. One was a football player named Josh, who had been the sort-of boyfriend of a girl Maddie knew (“like a Kyle-and-me kind of thing”), toward whom he’d been “super abusive.” When she informed Josh that the girl had told her “a lot about him,” he scoffed. “Don’t listen to anything she says. She’s crazy!” Maddie remained polite but distant, making it clear (at least she thought) that she was uninterested. Somehow, though, word got around the party that the two were going to hook up. “How did he get that message?” Maddie said when another boy asked her about the rumor. “I’m not going to hook up with him. He’s an asshole.” The boy smirked. “Well, we’ll see after a couple of drinks.” “What does that mean?” Maddie replied. “You can’t just say that stuff to girls!” The boy laughed, holding up his hands. “I’m kidding!” he said. Rape by the Numbers

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  And like that, there happened along one day this Ali something or other, a Mohammedan, who had acquired a divine calligraphy somewhere in the desert, and after he gets to know me, know that I am a man with big ears, he writes me a letter, a letter thirty-two pages long, with never a mistake, never a comma or a semicolon missing, and in it he explains (as if it were important for me to know) that the miracles of Christ—he went into them one by one—were not miracles at all, that they had all been performed before, even the Resurrection, by unknown men, men who understood the laws of nature, laws which, he insisted, our scientists know nothing about, but which were eternal laws and could be demonstrated to produce so-called miracles whenever the right man came along … and he, Ali, was in possession of the secret, but I was not to make it known because he, Ali, had chosen to be a messenger and “wear the badge of servitude” for a reason known only to him and to Allah, bless his name, but when the time came I had only to say the word and so forth and so on…. How had I managed to leave out all these divine behemoths and the ruckus they were constantly creating, me up on the carpet every few days to explain this and explain that, as if I had instigated their peculiar, inexplicably screwy behavior. Yeah, what a job trying to convince the big shot (with the brain of a midget) that the flower of America was seeded from the loins of these crack-pots, these monsters, these harebrained idiots who, whatever the mischief, were possessed of strange talents such as the ability to read the Cabala backwards, multiply ten columns of figures at a time or sit on a cake of ice and manifest signs of fever. None of these explanations, of course, could alleviate the horrendous fact that an elderly woman had been raped the night before by a swarthy devil delivering a death message. It was tough. I never could make things clear to him. Any more than I could present the case for Tobachnikov, the Talmudic student, who was the nearest replica of the living Christ that ever walked the streets of New York with Happy Easter messages in his hand. How could I say to him, this owl of a boss: “This devil needs help.

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

  The field of African American Women’s Intellectual History is strewn about with unrecognized Black female genius. Walker’s generation of scholars has done a great job of marking the graves of these women, so to speak, of making the case for their value and their presence. Yet, it is also true that too many of our intellectual genealogies and geographies begin and end in overgrown graveyards, amid a silent cacophony of unmarked graves. It is my generation’s job not only to make sure those markers remain meticulously landscaped and in full view but also to dig deeper, to think seriously about the material conditions and intellectual terms upon which our thinkers are memorialized, and to retrieve and revisit their work with renewed vigor and scrutiny. In this book, I seek to take seriously the intellectual formulations and methods put forth by these women; the range of methods they employed and deployed to challenge masculinist narratives of Black intellectual production; and the range of ways that they sought to throw off the dictates of Black respectability politics, to create new formulations of gender, and to offer new ideas of what a Black public might look like. Black women’s intellectual work has been bound integrally to our understanding of notions of the public and notions of gender politics and what they allow and disallow. The term race woman has no uniform meaning. But it does name and help to make visible multiple generations of Black women who dedicated their lives to the Black freedom struggle, not only by theorizing and implementing programs of racial uplift but also by contesting the gendered politics of racial knowledge production and pushing back against limiting notions of Blackness and womanhood. In so doing, these women created a robust and enduring tradition of Black public intellectual work. EpilogueStraight men, unintentionally or intentionally, have taken the work of queer Black women and erased our contributions. Perhaps if we were the charismatic Black men many are rallying around these days, it would have been a different story, but being Black queer women in this society (and apparently within these movements) tends to equal invisibility and nonrelevancy. We completely expect those who benefit directly and improperly from White supremacy to try and erase our existence. We fight that every day. But when it happens amongst our allies, we are baffled, we are saddened, and we are enraged. —Alicia Garza (2014)