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 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)

  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 Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  “I have had enough of [your] burnt offerings of rams And the fat of well-fed cattle [without your obedience]; And I take no pleasure in the blood of bulls or lambs or goats [offered without repentance]. 12 “When you come to appear before Me, Who requires this of you, this trampling of My [temple] courts [by your sinful feet]? 13 “Do not bring worthless offerings again, [Your] incense is repulsive to Me; [Your] New Moon and Sabbath [observances], the calling of assemblies— I cannot endure wickedness [your sin, your injustice, your wrongdoing] and [the squalor of] the festive assembly. 14 “I hate [the hypocrisy of] your New Moon festivals and your appointed feasts. They have become a burden to Me; I am weary of bearing them. 15 “So when you spread out your hands [in prayer, pleading for My help], I will hide My eyes from you; Yes, even though you offer many prayers, I will not be listening. Your hands are full of blood! 16 “Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; Get your evil deeds out of My sight. Stop doing evil, 17 Learn to do good. Seek justice, Rebuke the ruthless, Defend the fatherless, Plead for the [rights of the] widow [in court]. “Let Us Reason” 18 “Come now, and let us reason together,” Says the LORD . “a Though your sins are like scarlet, They shall be as white as snow; Though they are red like crimson, They shall be like wool. 19 “If you are willing and obedient, You shall eat the best of the land; 20 But if you refuse and rebel, You shall be devoured by the sword.” For the mouth of the LORD has spoken. Zion Corrupted, to Be Redeemed 21 How the faithful city has become a prostitute [idolatrous, despicable], She who was full of justice! Right standing with God once lodged in her, But now murderers. 22 Your silver has turned to b lead, Your wine is diluted with water. 23 Your rulers are rebels And companions of thieves; Everyone loves bribes And chases after gifts. They do not defend the fatherless, Nor does the widow’s cause come before them [instead they delay or turn a deaf ear]. 24 Therefore the Lord GOD of hosts, The Mighty One of Israel, declares: “Ah, I will be freed of My adversaries And avenge Myself on My enemies. 25 “And I will turn My hand against you, And will [thoroughly] purge away your dross as with lye And remove all your tin (impurity). 26 “Then I will restore your judges as at the first, And your counselors as at the beginning; Afterward you will be called the city of righteousness, The faithful city.” 27 Zion will be redeemed with justice And her repentant ones with righteousness. 28 But rebels and sinners will be crushed and destroyed together, And those who abandon (turn away from) the LORD will be consumed (perish).

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  14 So the angel who was speaking with me said to me, “Proclaim, ‘Thus says the LORD of hosts, “I am jealous [with a burning, fiery passion] for Jerusalem and for Zion [demanding what is rightfully and uniquely mine] with a great jealousy. 15 “But I am very angry with the f nations who are at ease and feel secure; for while I was only a little angry, they g furthered the disaster [against the people of Israel].” 16 ‘Therefore, thus says the LORD , “I have returned to Jerusalem with mercy and compassion. My house shall be built in it,” says the LORD of hosts, “and a h measuring line shall be stretched out over Jerusalem.” ’ 17 “Proclaim again, ‘Thus says the LORD of hosts, “My cities shall again overflow with prosperity, and the LORD shall again comfort Zion and again choose Jerusalem.” ’ ” 18 Then I looked up, and saw four horns (powers)! 19 So I asked the angel who was speaking with me, “What are these?” And he answered me, “These are the horns [the powerful Gentile nations] that have scattered Judah (the Southern Kingdom), Israel (the Northern Kingdom), and Jerusalem (capital city of Judah).” 20 Then the LORD showed me four craftsmen. 21 I asked, “What are these [horns and craftsmen] coming to do?” And he said, “These are the horns (powers) that have scattered Judah so that no man raised up his head [because of the suffering inflicted by the Gentile nations]. But these craftsmen have come to terrify them and make them panic, and throw down the horns of the nations who have lifted up their horns against the land of Judah in order to scatter it.” Zechariah 2 God’s Favor to Zion 1 A ND I looked up, and saw a man with a measuring line in his hand. 2 So I said, “Where are you going?” And he said to me, “To measure Jerusalem, to see how wide it is and how long it is.” 3 And behold, the angel who was speaking with me was going out, and another angel was coming out to meet him, 4 and he said to the second angel, “Run, speak to that young man, saying, ‘Jerusalem will be inhabited [like villages] without walls [spreading out into the open country] because of the great number of people and livestock in it. 5 ‘For I,’ declares the LORD , ‘will be a wall of fire around her [protecting her from enemies], and I will be the glory in her midst.’ ” 6 “a Hear this! Flee from [Babylon] the land of the north [which shall come under judgment],” declares the LORD , “for I have scattered you like the four winds of the heavens,” declares the LORD . 7 “Hear, Zion (Jerusalem)!

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  15 “But you trusted in and relied on your beauty and prostituted yourself [in idolatry and its debauched rituals] because of your fame, and you poured out your immoralities on every [willing] passer-by and your beauty was his [as you worshiped the idols of the Gentile nations]. 16 “You took some of your clothes and made for yourself [decorated] high places and shrines of various colors and prostituted yourself on them—things which should never have come about and taken place. 17 “You also took your beautiful jewels and beautiful vessels made of My gold and My silver, which I had given you, and made for yourself images of men so that you could prostitute yourself with them; 18 and you took your embroidered clothing and covered them, and offered My oil and My incense before them. 19 “Also My bread which I gave you, [made from the] fine flour and oil and honey with which I fed you, you even offered it before idols [no better than cow dung] as a sweet and soothing aroma; so it happened,” says the Lord GOD . 20 “Moreover, you took your sons and your daughters whom you had borne to Me, and you destroyed them as sacrifices [to your man-made gods]. Were your gross immoralities so small a matter? 21 “You slaughtered My children and offered them up to [worthless] idols, forcing them to pass through the [hideousness of the] fire. 22 “And in all your repulsive acts and prostitutions (idolatrous immoralities) you did not [pause to] remember the days of your youth, when you were naked and bare, squirming in your [newborn] blood. 23 “Then it came about after all your wickedness (‘Woe, woe to you!’ says the Lord GOD ), 24 that you built yourself an c altar for prostitution and made yourself a high place [for ritual prostitution] in every square [of Jerusalem]. 25 “At the beginning of every street you built your high place and made your beauty repulsive; and you offered your body to every passer-by and multiplied your obscene immorality. 26 “You also prostituted yourself with the Egyptians, your lustful neighbors [by embracing their pagan rituals], and you multiplied your obscene immorality to provoke Me to anger. 27 “Behold now [listen very carefully], I have stretched out My hand against you, reduced your portion, and handed you over to the desire of those who hate you, the daughters of the Philistines, who are ashamed of your infamous behavior. 28 “You prostituted yourself with the Assyrians because you were not satisfied; you prostituted yourself with them and still were not satisfied. 29 “Moreover, you increased your obscene immorality with the land of tradesmen, Chaldea (Babylonia), and yet even with this you were not satisfied.” ’ ” 30 “How weakened by longing and lust is your heart (mind),” says the Lord GOD , “while you do all these things, the actions of a bold and brazen prostitute.

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

  Meddling: A Theory of Agitation In 1904, a group of Black editors, headed by J. W. E. Bowen, created a Black literary and political magazine called Voice of the Negro. Terrell regularly contributed biographical sketches of prominent race figures and, occasionally, a political essay. She published one of those essays, “The Mission of Meddler,” in August 1905. “Everybody who has tried to advance the interests of the human race by redressing wrongs or by inaugurating reforms has first been called a meddler,” she wrote. 11 Yet, she laid out a systematic case for the political necessity of meddling. As both public intellectual work and political theorizing, Terrell’s essay marks an important moment in mapping her own intellectual terrain and her increasing interest in racial agitation as a form of political engagement. The essay—a defense of meddling as a political act—also contains the seeds of comic whimsy and political mischief that sometimes emerge in Terrell’s work. For instance, to those who took issue with meddling on the principle that it would unduly involve them in the affairs of someone else, she wrote, “[T]his definition tickles the selfish old crustaceans to death; for they consider that it absolves them completely from all responsibility for their neighbor’s welfare.” 12 Nevertheless, The United States had an “imperative need” for “active, insistent and fearless meddlers who will spend their time investigating institutions, customs, and laws whose effect on any color or class is depressing or bad.” 13 For instance, in the U.S. context, unlike Russia or Great Britain, which also needed their own meddlers, “the meddler should take it upon himself to ask disagreeable questions about the political corruption which makes a single white man in one section equal to seven in another.” The American meddler should further inquire why intelligent, worthy, and well-to-do citizens are denied the rights guaranteed them by the constitutions, because their complexion happens not to be fashionable in the particular section which treats them as peons and slaves, while men who are inferior to them in both intelligence and respectability are granted all their rights, privileges, and immunities simply because their faces are white, although it is through no effort, or merit, or prowess on their part that this desirable complexion has been secured. 14 Like her counterpart Fannie Williams had done a decade earlier, she exposed the myth of American meritocracy and the unfairness of white-skin privilege.

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

  By the late 1970s, figures like Barbara Smith and Mary Helen Washington were steering Black feminism into academic spaces and by 1991, more than ten years after she published her first book, bell hooks became the poster child for a new generation of professional Black feminist women who had obtained doctoral degrees, written books, and taught courses about differential aspects of Black women’s lives. In a collection of essays and interviews that she coauthored with Cornel West entitled Breaking Bread, hooks reflected on the working conditions and livelihoods of Black women intellectuals in an essay of the same title. hooks, very much in line with Pierce, made clear that the continued challenge of seeing Black women as intellectuals is rooted in our understanding of what it means to be an intellectual: Moreso than any group of women in this society, black women have been seen as “all body, no mind.” ... To justify white male sexual exploitation and rape of Black females during slavery, white culture had to produce an iconography of Black female bodies that insisted on representing them as highly sexed, the perfect embodiment of primitive, unbridled eroticism. ... Seen as sexual sign, Black female bodies are placed in a category that, culturally speaking, is deemed far removed from the life of the mind. 4 As Black women in the current moment lead street protests in major cities to combat police brutality, they continue to confront the possibility that their labors will be perceived as “all body, no mind.” hooks’s observation clarifies both the fervent embrace of respectability politics among historic Black women thinkers and the reason that respectability politics remain a deeply contested ground among Black feminist thinkers, especially in the current movement. Her observation makes clear why Anna Julia Cooper’s formulation of embodied discourse constitutes a radical act. Cooper, whose theorization of embodiment I discuss in the prologue, placed the material condition of the Black female body at the center of her understanding and theorization of Black life, politics, and intellectual possibility. In doing so, she disrupted the tacit and prevailing logic of Western thought that Black women’s bodies are merely there to do reproductive and service labor within Black communities. These questions about embodiment and reproductive labor surface over and over again in the lives of women examined in this book. Whether it is concerns about how public intellectual work made Black women unfit for marriage or other kinds of regulation of Black female sexuality, particularly of the unmarried and nonheterosexual varieties, the work of being a race woman demands an engagement with the politics of the black (female) body. Consequently, the black female body takes center stage in much of the thought work produced by Black women, as they discuss the

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

  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.

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

  Notwithstanding the clear dig at Black men’s “inadequate equipment,” a dig that is shot through with Murray’s own anxieties regarding her “equipment,” she nailed the analysis of the ways that racism and the failures of liberal American democracy had stunted and entrapped Black men in retrograde ideas about Black masculinity. This frustrated masculine (and gender) development equated to a “general mis-education of the sexes,” which, when coupled with “outmoded social tabus [sic] … have helped to form rigid moulds into which the sexes are poured and which determine in advance the role men and women are to play in community life.” The politics of racial manhood compelled Black men to “act as if they are the lords of creation, the breadwinners and warriors of our time and of all time.” But, Murray assessed, “they play the role with varying degrees of hamacting and success” and really “are as frightened and insecure as modern women are.”53 In Murray’s estimation, Black men were frustrated patriarchs, not full-fledged patriarchal figures. In terms of Black feminist assessments of patriarchy, that intellectual distinction is important. The Negro male, she wrote, is “the victim of constant frustration in his role as a male because socially he is subordinate to the white woman although he is trained to act as a member of the dominant sex. He is required to fit his human emotions into a racially determined pattern which may have nothing to do with his desires.”54 On the one hand, Black men want to dominate white women as true and proper males; on the other hand, they are sometimes sexually attracted to them. In both cases, the logic of racial segregation denies them the opportunity to exercise these male prerogatives. It is surprising that Murray does not further interrogate the problematic relationship implied here between Black men and white women, especially since she indicates early in the essay that white women are Black women’s allies around issues of sex discrimination. Instead, she focused her attention on the ways that experiences of subordinate masculinity55 precipitated the abuse of Black women, leading to Black men that would “vent [their] resentments upon the Negro woman who may become [their] sex partner.”

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  I saw beneath the superficial physiognomy of skin and bone the indestructible world which man has always carried within him; it was neither old nor new, really, but the eternally true world which changes from moment to moment. Everything I looked at was palimpsest and there was no layer of writing too strange for me to decipher. When my companions left me of an evening I would often sit down and write to my friends the Australian Bushmen or to the Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley or to the Igorotes in the Philippines. I had to write English, naturally, because it was the only language I spoke, but between my language and the telegraphic code employed by my bosom friends there was a world of difference. Any primitive man would have understood me, any man of archaic epochs would have understood me: only those about me, that is to say, a continent of a hundred million people, failed to understand my language. To write intelligibly for them I would have been obliged first of all to kill something, secondly, to arrest time. I had just made the realization that life is indestructible and that there is no such thing as time, only the present. Did they expect me to deny a truth which it had taken me all my life to catch a glimpse of? They most certainly did. The one thing they did not want to hear about was that life is indestructible. Was not their precious new world reared on the destruction of the innocent, on rape and plunder and torture and devastation? Both continents had been violated; both continents had been stripped and plundered of all that was precious—in things . No greater humiliation, it seems to me, was meted out to any man than to Montezuma; no race was ever more ruthlessly wiped out than the American Indian; no land was ever raped in the foul and bloody way that California was raped by the gold-diggers. I blush to think of our origins—our hands are steeped in blood and crime. And there is no let-up to the slaughter and the pillage, as I discovered at first hand traveling throughout the length and breadth of the land. Down to the closest friend every man is a potential murderer. Often it wasn’t necessary to bring out the gun or the lasso or the branding iron—they had found subtler and more devilish ways of torturing and killing their own. For me the most excruciating agony was to have the word annihilated before it had even left my mouth. I learned, by bitter experience, to hold my tongue; I learned to sit in silence, and even smile, when actually I was foaming at the mouth. I learned to shake hands and say how do you do to all these innocent-looking fiends who were only waiting for me to sit down in order to suck my blood.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  55 Now the chief priests and the entire Council (Sanhedrin, Jewish High Court) were trying to obtain testimony against Jesus [which they could use] to have Him [condemned and] executed, but they were not finding any. 56 For many [people] were giving false testimony against Him, but their testimonies were not consistent. 57 Some stood up and began to give false testimony against Him, saying, 58 “We heard Him say, ‘I will destroy this temple (sanctuary) that was made with hands, and in three days I will build another made without hands.’ ” [John 2:19–21 ] 59 Not even in this respect was their testimony consistent. 60 The high priest stood up and came forward and asked Jesus, “Have You no answer to give [in response] to what these men are testifying against You?” 61 But Jesus kept silent and gave no answer at all. Again the high priest was questioning Him, and saying to Him, “Are You the Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed), the Son of the o Blessed One?” 62 Jesus said, “I am; and you will [all] see THE S ON OF M AN SEATED [with authority] AT THE RIGHT HAND OF P OWER (the Father), and COMING WITH THE CLOUDS OF HEAVEN .” [Ps 110:1 ; Dan 7:13 ] 63 Then p tearing his robe [to express his indignation], the high priest said, “What further need do we have of witnesses? [Num 14:6 ] 64 “You have heard the blasphemy [that is, His claim to be the Son of God]. What is your decision?” And they all condemned Him to be [guilty and] deserving of death. [Lev 24:16 ] 65 And some began to spit on Him, and to blindfold Him, and to beat Him with their fists, and to say to Him, “Prophesy [by telling us who hit you]!” Then the officers took custody of Him and struck him in the face. Peter’s Denials 66 While Peter was down below in the courtyard, one of the servant-girls of the high priest came, [Matt 26:69–75 ; Luke 22:55–62 ; John 18:16–18 , 25–27 ] 67 and when she saw Peter warming himself, she looked intently at him and said, “You were with Jesus the Nazarene, too.” 68 But he denied it, saying, “I neither know nor understand what you are talking about.” Then he went out [of the courtyard] to the porch, q [ and a rooster crowed.] 69 The servant-girl saw him, and began once more to tell the bystanders, “This [man] is one of them.” 70 But again he denied it. After a little while, the bystanders again said to Peter, “You are in fact one of them, for [it is clear from your accent, that] you are a Galilean, too.” 71 But he began to r invoke a curse [on himself] and to swear [an oath], “I do not know this man you are talking about!” 72 Immediately a rooster crowed the second time.